Development and Discussion

[eformo]

Thanks for the reply Angel.

I'll be waiting for it and see if I can't finish my current playthrough before then. Thanks for all you've done! My enjoyment from the game has been renewed with every new mod pack.

[Light]

If you don't mind my asking, what are your design plans with how your science functions?

Your design philosophy is to take something already in place and put your own unique spin on it; To make it more involved and meaningful. This is why the vanilla experience feels so empty when we stop using the mods. Since you have three different canister types plus multiple labs, I can only wonder how you intend to handle science and improve upon the system to make it more involved.

I do recall you saying long ago that you really wanted to have tech advances be a lot slower so you don't skip phases of the game so quickly to the point research becomes obsolete shortly after you obtain it. This is something I completely agree with and hope you still have that in mind with what you're working on. Mods like AAI Industries have helped the burner phase have more meaning and require better planning for the longer term, rather than 5 minutes and it's over. Things like robots and certain buildings can be rushed to Mk4 rather fast to the point Mk2-3 are useless and so on.

If anything I'd like to know if your thoughts on that have changed since then.

[crysanja]

A few issues:
With bob mods
Wood/resin production is very difficult without bobs greenhouses.
Wooden boards are fine.

Molten steel production is less effective then smelting iron plates(smelting 2:1).
Zinc ingot production is horrible,sorting of junks is required and there is a messy smelting process.


Plate production via sheet coils has the same effectiveness then just producing them out of molten material.(until much later, when the process can be improved)

[donoya]

A few issues:
With bob mods
Wood/resin production is very difficult without bobs greenhouses.
Wooden boards are fine.

Molten steel production is less effective then smelting iron plates(smelting 2:1).
Zinc ingot production is horrible,sorting of junks is required and there is a messy smelting process.


Plate production via sheet coils has the same effectiveness then just producing them out of molten material.(until much later, when the process can be improved)

All of these are intended, from what I can tell. And even if they were, most of these aren't something on Arch666Angel's end.

[mrvn]

A few issues:
With bob mods
Wood/resin production is very difficult without bobs greenhouses.
Wooden boards are fine.

Molten steel production is less effective then smelting iron plates(smelting 2:1).
Zinc ingot production is horrible,sorting of junks is required and there is a messy smelting process.


Plate production via sheet coils has the same effectiveness then just producing them out of molten material.(until much later, when the process can be improved)

Isn't the point of plate production that you get 4 times the throughput? It simply is faster so you need fewer buildings.

[Proxy]

small question, I know mods aren't supposed to be the most realistic...

but why does 100x Water give 60x Hydrogen and 40x Oxygen? please don't tell me because "2/3 water is Hydrogen and 1/3 Oxygen" bullshit. i mean first, each Water molecule has Oxygen in it, so the Oxygen made has to be atleast the same amount as Water used. Same with Hydrogen but doubled.

Formular: n H20 + Energy -> 2n H + n O
(n can be any positive number, no fractions)

and in the Mod's case H2 is Hydrogen, and O2 is Oxygen. so the numbers should be halfed.

Formular: n H2O + Energy -> n H2 + 0.5n O2
(n can be any positive even number, no fractions)

so 100x Water should make 100x Hydorgen and 50x Oxygen.

hehe, in unclean water it could technically even throw out Deuterium at a low percentage chance.

[torne]

The liquid units in factorio are volume, not molecules.

[asura6]

Can we get a nerf for direct smelting of crushed ores when Angel Smelting is active in the pack? Also can iron plate to steel plate be disabled if Metallurgy is active or at least expensive recipe will be default?

Also I am hyped for new science packs!!!

[ridesdragons]

Can we get a nerf for direct smelting of crushed ores when Angel Smelting is active in the pack? Also can iron plate to steel plate be disabled if Metallurgy is active or at least expensive recipe will be default?

1. direct smelting is already nerfed. direct smelting is 3 crushed ores->1 plate. sorting becomes 4 crushed ores->1 slag and 3 regular ores, and each regular ore smelts to a plate on a 1:1 ratio.

if you mean that 1:1 ratio compared to advanced smelting, it's still not as useful as advanced smelting, as 1. advanced smelting allows shortcuts and 2. advanced smelting is more efficient than sorted smelting. I remember seeing somewhere it was something like a 25% boost by default, with 25% more when using ore processing? anyway, there are a number of items that can -only- be made with advanced smelting, and the ones that have alternatives aren't supposed to be pathetic. if you want them to be pathetic, there's a mod that does that.

steel smelting in vanilla is 5 iron:1 steel. with angel's advanced smelting, this is 3:1. so it's better. the only time it's worse is if you're using bob's mods, which sets it to 2:1, but even then there's an option in the config to disable that.

angel's mods is not meant to replace other methods of progression, but rather add alternatives. frequently he adds several methods of his own, such as getting resin or even plastic from wood or oil, or skipping oil processing and instead using the farms that he intends to add in the next version (or whatever it is the farms do, point is they give an alternative path). even with ores it's possible to play with just stone due to the ability to crystallize them into ores (which is how the island mod works, since there are no ores in that and you can only get it from crystallization). there are outside mods that makes these alternatives mandatory (like the forced angel's smelting mod I mentioned)

[BlakeMW]

Direct smelting of crushed ore is quite good as it is now, it's marginally better than direct smelting of sorted ore* which is okay because with sorting you get slag and a secondary ore type, but much inferior to smelting of "minecarts". As for why it's not a bad thing that direct smelting is fairly good, it helps to streamline the early game and improves the longevity of early smelting setups - basic sorting gets a big upgrade with ore processing while smelting crushed ore is a dead end, so since there's no upgrade path at least it can not be terrible.

With steel I somewhat agree, there's pretty much no reason to go the Steel Ingots route because the Iron Ingot recipes are always more advanced (until you've researched everything) so if you're integrating manganese/silicon/nickel/chrome into your iron/steel production you're better off using the iron recipes and smelting the iron plates into steel. Although assuming the mod is setup properly this is really the only advantage of using iron plates->steel smelting.


* Specifics:

3 Crushed Ore -> 2 Plates
1 Crushed Ore -> 0.67 Plates

4 Crushed Ore -> 3 Sorted Ore + 1 Slag (becomes 0.16 ore, a +5% yield boost in this case)
4 Sorted Ore -> 3 Plates
1 Crushed Ore -> 0.56 Plates = 0.37 primary + 0.19 secondary

With basic smelting you gain the 1:1 ratio instead of 3:4, a 33% yield boost (bringing yield up to 0.75/crushed ore), then ore processing provides a +50% yield boost on top of that bringing it up to 1.125/crushed ore.

I often skip the first stage of smelting when possible and go directly to ore processing since that's where the big advantage comes in. Especially good when combined with combining recipes so you get fully 1.5/crushed ore.

[Proxy]

The liquid units in factorio are volume, not molecules.

Units in factorio are just Values.

They have no actual Unit, like Liters or cm³... otherwise it would say that.

at 25C, 1l of Water (1kg) makes ~98.8l (111.1g) of Hydrogen and ~622.0l (888.9g) of Oxygen.

so the numbers can neither be mass nor Volume.

[torne]

The liquid units in factorio are volume, not molecules.

Units in factorio are just Values.

They have no actual Unit, like Liters or cm³... otherwise it would say that.

at 25C, 1l of Water (1kg) makes ~98.8l (111.1g) of Hydrogen and ~622.0l (888.9g) of Oxygen.

so the numbers can neither be mass nor Volume.

Tanks, pipes, etc all store a fixed amount of liquid. This means the liquid measurements logically must be volume: if a tank can hold 25000 liquid regardless of what liquid that is, then 25000 is a measurement of volume, even if the unit is undefined (I didn't say it was any particular unit of volume). The base game didn't originally include any gases (though there is now steam, which is just a liquid that's called steam) and doesn't handle gases specially (there's no concept of the pressure a liquid is under), so regardless of mods introducing more "gases" they are still behaving like liquids, which means that it's not going to be consistent with real world chemistry no matter what you do.

So, if you wanted to argue that Angel should change the numbers in their gas recipes to be more chemically accurate, you'd be arguing a stronger point if you proposed the volume-based numbers you just gave (at least, for some defined pressure; doesn't have to be STP, you could scale it fairly arbitrarily), rather than the molecule-based numbers you previously mentioned, but it doesn't seem like there's any particular reason to prefer that when there's no gas simulation anyway.

[asura6]

3 Crushed Ore -> 2 Plates
1 Crushed Ore -> 0.67 Plates

4 Crushed Ore -> 3 Sorted Ore + 1 Slag (becomes 0.16 ore, a +5% yield boost in this case)
4 Sorted Ore -> 3 Plates
1 Crushed Ore -> 0.56 Plates = 0.37 primary + 0.19 secondary

With basic smelting you gain the 1:1 ratio instead of 3:4, a 33% yield boost

Here's the point many players argue that if you need 1 of 4 basic metals direct smelting is enough and they don't go sorting until midlegame. The 1 crushed ore = 0.67 plates is enough for them cuz 0.67> combined 0.56 so what I want is to do a nerf to 0.67 or a buff to basic Metallurgy of 1:1 either way I want that sorting to be a obvious better choice against direct smelting.
(Also I play Angel with bobs so I can't say anything about pure Angel stuff)

[Arch666Angel]

3 Crushed Ore -> 2 Plates
1 Crushed Ore -> 0.67 Plates

4 Crushed Ore -> 3 Sorted Ore + 1 Slag (becomes 0.16 ore, a +5% yield boost in this case)
4 Sorted Ore -> 3 Plates
1 Crushed Ore -> 0.56 Plates = 0.37 primary + 0.19 secondary

With basic smelting you gain the 1:1 ratio instead of 3:4, a 33% yield boost

Here's the point many players argue that if you need 1 of 4 basic metals direct smelting is enough and they don't go sorting until midlegame. The 1 crushed ore = 0.67 plates is enough for them cuz 0.67> combined 0.56 so what I want is to do a nerf to 0.67 or a buff to basic Metallurgy of 1:1 either way I want that sorting to be a obvious better choice against direct smelting.
(Also I play Angel with bobs so I can't say anything about pure Angel stuff)

The real advantage of using and setting up a sorting and then advanced smelting setup even at tier 1 is that it is future prove, at least the chain for iron ingots doesnt change that much up to the late game. The other thing is that if you want to be a 100% efficient you would go out as fast as possible and find a jivolite and crotinium patch for combined sorting and then use advanced smelting on top, so you have a 1:1 ore to plate conversion.

The liquid units in factorio are volume, not molecules.

Units in factorio are just Values.

They have no actual Unit, like Liters or cm³... otherwise it would say that.

at 25C, 1l of Water (1kg) makes ~98.8l (111.1g) of Hydrogen and ~622.0l (888.9g) of Oxygen.

so the numbers can neither be mass nor Volume.

Tanks, pipes, etc all store a fixed amount of liquid. This means the liquid measurements logically must be volume: if a tank can hold 25000 liquid regardless of what liquid that is, then 25000 is a measurement of volume, even if the unit is undefined (I didn't say it was any particular unit of volume). The base game didn't originally include any gases (though there is now steam, which is just a liquid that's called steam) and doesn't handle gases specially (there's no concept of the pressure a liquid is under), so regardless of mods introducing more "gases" they are still behaving like liquids, which means that it's not going to be consistent with real world chemistry no matter what you do.

So, if you wanted to argue that Angel should change the numbers in their gas recipes to be more chemically accurate, you'd be arguing a stronger point if you proposed the volume-based numbers you just gave (at least, for some defined pressure; doesn't have to be STP, you could scale it fairly arbitrarily), rather than the molecule-based numbers you previously mentioned, but it doesn't seem like there's any particular reason to prefer that when there's no gas simulation anyway.

Here is the magic: If you put a storage tank full of water through a boiler and heat the water to steam, you can fit all the steam back into the same tank...

[mrvn]

The liquid units in factorio are volume, not molecules.

Then 100 water should give 60000 hydrogen and 20000 oxygen (or whatever the right volume ratios are). Water is way more dense than the gases separated.

[mrvn]

Direct smelting of crushed ore is quite good as it is now, it's marginally better than direct smelting of sorted ore* which is okay because with sorting you get slag and a secondary ore type, but much inferior to smelting of "minecarts". As for why it's not a bad thing that direct smelting is fairly good, it helps to streamline the early game and improves the longevity of early smelting setups - basic sorting gets a big upgrade with ore processing while smelting crushed ore is a dead end, so since there's no upgrade path at least it can not be terrible.

With steel I somewhat agree, there's pretty much no reason to go the Steel Ingots route because the Iron Ingot recipes are always more advanced (until you've researched everything) so if you're integrating manganese/silicon/nickel/chrome into your iron/steel production you're better off using the iron recipes and smelting the iron plates into steel. Although assuming the mod is setup properly this is really the only advantage of using iron plates->steel smelting.


* Specifics:

3 Crushed Ore -> 2 Plates
1 Crushed Ore -> 0.67 Plates

4 Crushed Ore -> 3 Sorted Ore + 1 Slag (becomes 0.16 ore, a +5% yield boost in this case)
4 Sorted Ore -> 3 Plates
1 Crushed Ore -> 0.56 Plates = 0.37 primary + 0.19 secondary

With basic smelting you gain the 1:1 ratio instead of 3:4, a 33% yield boost (bringing yield up to 0.75/crushed ore), then ore processing provides a +50% yield boost on top of that bringing it up to 1.125/crushed ore.

I often skip the first stage of smelting when possible and go directly to ore processing since that's where the big advantage comes in. Especially good when combined with combining recipes so you get fully 1.5/crushed ore.

It kinds of feels to me like the first ore sorting is useless though. You have no use for slag for a very long time and even then it is hard to convert to ores and has minimal yield. Handling the slag is just so much trouble for no obviously visible gain. You very easily get to mixed ore sorting where you get more yield, no slag and pure ores that don't need to be filtered and balanced. Plus you need way more iron than copper at the start (more than the 2:1 ratio from sorting saphirite). I used the direct sorting and never needed to sort any stiratite at all. But I had to build chest after chest to fill with slag.

As I see it know the only reason to ever use the direct sorting is if you cant find jivonite and crotinium ores without running into too many aliens.

PS: some sorting for bobmonium and rubyte for lead, glass etc makes sense since you only need very little of that to start with.

[torne]

The liquid units in factorio are volume, not molecules.

Then 100 water should give 60000 hydrogen and 20000 oxygen (or whatever the right volume ratios are). Water is way more dense than the gases separated.

As I said, because factorio doesn't do gas simulation, talking about volumes of gases is pretty much meaningless anyway. Everything is actually a liquid, so real chemistry doesn't work

[arbarbonif]

It kinds of feels to me like the first ore sorting is useless though. You have no use for slag for a very long time and even then it is hard to convert to ores and has minimal yield. Handling the slag is just so much trouble for no obviously visible gain. You very easily get to mixed ore sorting where you get more yield, no slag and pure ores that don't need to be filtered and balanced. Plus you need way more iron than copper at the start (more than the 2:1 ratio from sorting saphirite). I used the direct sorting and never needed to sort any stiratite at all. But I had to build chest after chest to fill with slag.

As I see it know the only reason to ever use the direct sorting is if you cant find jivonite and crotinium ores without running into too many aliens.

PS: some sorting for bobmonium and rubyte for lead, glass etc makes sense since you only need very little of that to start with.

I use CHMod, which adds a recipe that turns stone into silicon, which means you can feed it back into the iron 1 for 1. I end up short of iron until the silicon/iron recipe is online, then I end up short of copper for a while (usually fixed by adding a small stiratite sorter into the mix). I bascially run my entire starter base off of saphirite sorting. 4 level 3 crushers and level 2 sorters provide about 1.2K iron/minute, which is my goal for the starter base. Lead and tin I usually smelt crushed.

Adding a actual use for stone makes it way less painful.

[Arch666Angel]

It kinds of feels to me like the first ore sorting is useless though. You have no use for slag for a very long time and even then it is hard to convert to ores and has minimal yield. Handling the slag is just so much trouble for no obviously visible gain. You very easily get to mixed ore sorting where you get more yield, no slag and pure ores that don't need to be filtered and balanced. Plus you need way more iron than copper at the start (more than the 2:1 ratio from sorting saphirite). I used the direct sorting and never needed to sort any stiratite at all. But I had to build chest after chest to fill with slag.

As I see it know the only reason to ever use the direct sorting is if you cant find jivonite and crotinium ores without running into too many aliens.

PS: some sorting for bobmonium and rubyte for lead, glass etc makes sense since you only need very little of that to start with.

I use CHMod, which adds a recipe that turns stone into silicon, which means you can feed it back into the iron 1 for 1. I end up short of iron until the silicon/iron recipe is online, then I end up short of copper for a while (usually fixed by adding a small stiratite sorter into the mix). I bascially run my entire starter base off of saphirite sorting. 4 level 3 crushers and level 2 sorters provide about 1.2K iron/minute, which is my goal for the starter base. Lead and tin I usually smelt crushed.

Adding a actual use for stone makes it way less painful.

CHMod add a few recipes that really break the balance, stone to silicon is one, wood to coal is another. Stone is if put through slag processing kind of an omni resource, you are usually starved for stone/slag in the late game.

For me the issue is more that you the first levels of combined sorting are too easy to set up, so I might do some additional changes to what I have already planed: Adding brown catalyst to the pure iron, copper, tin and lead sorting recipes.

[Nindydar]

For me the issue is more that you the first levels of combined sorting are too easy to set up, so I might do some additional changes to what I have already planed: Adding brown catalyst to the pure iron, copper, tin and lead sorting recipes.

I tend to agree, as you said I tend to rush for iron/copper direct smelting as early as possible because it is quite simple to set up if you have easy access to Jiv/Cron. And late game I tend to run a 100% direct sorting setup for all ores rather than trying to balance multiple tiers of mixed sorting. This does tend to leave me a bit starved for slag/stone to make the brown catalysts but I solve this by using some of my thermal water to make catalysts and using bioprocessing to make most of my lithium products. This also leaves me with little use for the metallurgy mixed melting recipes as what is the point of cutting iron with silicon when iron is much easier to direct sort than silicon is (no brown catalyst). I think requiring brown catalysts for T1 direct sorting would make the whole sorting process much more meaningful because it would become difficult to run a pure-direct sort setup with the amount of iron you need for your factory unless you have a ludicrous amount of thermal water to convert. I think it would push me to use mixed sorting just for the extra slag which then leaves me with unbalanced ore production which in turn would push me to use the mixed melting recipes from metallurgy as well.