Factorio Forums

Hello,

First, I wanted to say, great mod set. All of the Angel's mods are very interesting, and challenging. I've yet to actually finish the game with Angel's + Bob's because I keep wanting redesign my base as I get a better grasp on how all the resources fit together. Thank you for putting so much effort into this and releasing it for us all to enjoy.

I have one quick question/suggestion: have you considered lowering the yield for the pure ore sorting?

I find it interesting to balance production with the Ore sorting processes that yield many different ores and slag, but it seems like there's little motivation to build complex sorting structures because once the 100%, pure ore sorting processes are researched, there's really no reason to handle slag, etc. Sure, the more exotic ore sorting doesn't become available until later in the tech tree, but it seems like so little of those ores is needed that it's pretty easy to use a complex ore sorting process only for small yields that are managed by hand until the "pure" sorting is available.

I think it might be more compelling if the "pure" ore sorting never yielded above, say, 75% so that it becomes more resource efficient to do complex ore sorting.

I can't say I understand what the problem is.

As someone who used dirty refining exclusively in a 120+ hour map until learning about the pure method, I found there to be no downside aside from exotic ores stockpiling too much since they were rarely used. The design for a dirty method is literally a line with an inserter between the structures, no real design work is required.

The pure method at least requires belts to zig zag between each other to get the required ores, and slag is easily obtained from the crushed stone in the first process which you'll need for mineral catalysts to even do it in the first place. So it's a lot harder to design around since there's 4 inputs required instead of just the 1 ore.

The beauty of Angel's mods you'll learn is that there are many avenues of getting things done, neither one is really meant to punish you or push you to do it only one way. The vanilla experience has only one right way to do anything which is boring and always makes setups identical. Since you also like the dirty method, that's great, stick to it. But there's nothing wrong with pure sorting as is, nor should we push people away from the choice if they prefer to make it.

I guess the only "problem" is that I think there's no upside to building out slag processing and using one of the "dirty" chains. I was building out slag processing in my runs, but then I realized it's more efficient to just run the 2/3rds processes for iron, tin, lead, and copper until the pure versions are available. The dirty processes only need to be used a tiny amount for Quartz, etc. until the pure processes become available.

To your point, I guess you need brown catalyst at a certain point, so you always end up processing slag. However, it makes slag handling an annoyance since you'll never make large quantities as a side effect of ore processing.