Valuable Byproducts

[The Phoenixian]

The idea here is simple, right now production lines are fairly linear but what if some recipes, especially high volume recipes, produced waste byproducts which could be used in other sections of the factory.

Here's two illustraive examples, which don't work for their own reasons but are simple enough to get the point across.

First Imagine if iron gear wheels produced iron filings when manufactured in an assembly plant just as a thing that is generally useless, but which can be resmelted back in the furances to produce iron plates. On it's own it wouldn't be worth much of an imporovement, maybe one extra iron plate every ten or twenty gears, but when you're producing tens of thousands of iron gears over the course of the game, it adds up to become pretty sigificant.

In this case though there are much better ideas for getting players to work on their smelting lines but you can see how just encouraging a player to loop backwards could significantly affect how players would put together their factories.

Likewise, in a hypothetical version of Factorio where wood is actually useful, a lumbermill might also produce sawdust in addition to planks which a player might ship off to another section of a factory, say to a chemical plant where, it would serve as stabilizing material for dynamite.

Again, it's not a specific scenario I expect to ever happen, but you can see how it encourages two sections of a factory to be placed near to each other, or linked together in any case, when otherwise they might have nothing to do with each other.