Factorio Forums

One of the limitations I have come across while modding Factorio is that recipes, items, entities and research cannot be changed when the game has launched.
With elaborate scripting one could circumvent some of these limitations, but it is hardly a solution.
What I suggest is to make prototypes editable in-game. What I mean by that is:

• Research can change a prototype. For example a recipe for a machine becomes cheaper. A machine has reduced/increased power usage. You can hold more of an item in one stack.
• Researching one technology makes other technologies more expensive or cheaper. For example researching bot carry capacity will increase technology costs for bot movement speed. Researching a 'red' science technology makes other 'red' science technologies more expensive.

These changes would greatly benefit the modding community.

I don't think that prototypes even exist as such as the game is running. You can't even access them during run-time. Instead, they're processed and turned into program objects that perform the grunt-work, and the behavior we see is due to the interactions of those objects. What you want is to be able to access these objects and manipulate their data directly. However that brings its own host of problems. Synching is hard enough when every client knows what the prototypes look like.

What you really want is more research operators. You can implement a "cheaper machine" by re-locking its old recipe and unlocking a newer, cheaper recipe (that's what dictates the 'cheapness' of a machine). However, that requires new operators available for the research effects.

I think this is not how Factorio works. Changing a recipe is difficult and has many side effects, that I doubt a normal modder can fix them all without breaking the game in the next version. What I mean is, that these things are a) too slow b) cannot or better will not be updated with each game-version.

See https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... 23#p116123

Wyrm wrote:I don't think that prototypes even exist as such as the game is running. You can't even access them during run-time. Instead, they're processed and turned into program objects that perform the grunt-work, and the behavior we see is due to the interactions of those objects. What you want is to be able to access these objects and manipulate their data directly. However that brings its own host of problems. Synching is hard enough when every client knows what the prototypes look like.

What you really want is more research operators. You can implement a "cheaper machine" by re-locking its old recipe and unlocking a newer, cheaper recipe (that's what dictates the 'cheapness' of a machine). However, that requires new operators available for the research effects.

That would be a great improvement