Factorio Forums

I was looking through the recipe limits for Assembling Machine 1s versus 2s and 3s, and I noticed a few oddities.

In the base game, the rule is very simple. Every Assembling Machine recipe that doesn't have fluids can be done in a tier 1 machine, everything that does have a fluid recipe can't be done in them.

However, in Space Age this seems to be quite a bit more arbitrary. Looking purely at Intermediate Products, they can't do any Gleba-related recipes, but can do Space Science (and the only two other Space Age recipes are Tungsten Carbide and Holmium Plate, which both have a fluid input). Then, when you get to Production recipes, it's even more confusing. Foundries are of course unavailable because they have a fluid input, but Biochambers, Electromagnetic Plants and Cryoplants are all unavailable as well despite not requiring a fluid, while Recyclers, Agricultural Towers, Lightning Rods and Heating Towers are available. And for the Logistics, Space and Military tabs, there are no differences, except fluid-related recipes are disabled.

I'm not sure what's intended behavior, so I didn't want to just throw it into the Bug Reports, but I would assume that fluid inputs (or outputs, looking at you unbarrelling) should be the only limiter, right? Or, conversely (but less sensible imo), that no off-Nauvis recipes should be available to them.

I think we have to talk about history, we started like this:

basic-crafting, ( it should be hand crafting only recipe but later kill and unused.)( the kill I mean add it to all assembler.)
crafting,
advanced crafting,( gate keeping the engine unit so rpg player will stop crafting by hand and afk.)
crafting-with-fluid,

oil-processing,
chemistry,
centrifuging,

the game engine even pay extra attention on recipe of "crafting" but with fluid inputs, if such recipe is added via mods, it will just crash.

when the space age developed, we have few point to do and those are tricky:
1. we want old vanilla thing can be boosted with new machine
2. we want those new machine can boost making themselves
3. we need some starting recipes
and we have a limitation back then:
!. Recipe can only have ONE recipe category.

So we got those:
1=>chemistry-or-cryogenics,electronics,organic-or-chemistry,pressing
2=>electronics-or-assembling,cryogenics-or-assembling,metallurgy-or-assembling,organic-or-assembling
3=>recycling-or-hand-crafting,organic-or-hand-crafting
and dirty hack recipe category like this:
crafting-with-fluid-or-metallurgy

and such system is Absorlutely CURSED if you think about it, let said a mod want to add new chemical product like Glue, what category should it take?
if you add it to basic "chemistry" category it will mean you can ONLY make those in chemical plant,the modder like me in the past will rather do something like this:
1.add new recipe category for our recipes
2.scan all the entity of characters and crafting-machines and add our recipe category into that entity if the parent recipe category is existed.
but the space age just don't care and I have to make mod for it ( https://mods.factorio.com/mod/biochemical_plant ),
which just add a new category that can be made in all chemical capable machines.

and then everything changed when recipe can have additional_categories, space age could just add metallurgy into belts as additional category instead of being new one, and they can just add "hand-crafting" to those recipe you expect player can do it too etc.

and I have to say something, the engine can detect fluidboxes to know if such machine can do certain recipe, and will actually hide those recipe, so "crafting-with-fluid" is really pointless anyway, and rocket silo can select the "rocket-part" if you somehow install and uninstall mod in a map to make it fall into a illegal state, the fixed_recipe is really only hide the selection button before 2.0, not testing in 2.0 tho

and I think assembler1 should be also capable for category "organic-or-hand-crafting" and handling fruit.