Factorio Forums

Hi I have a cool idea for a Recycling Mod but with my programing skills/experience being next to zero I don’t think I can make it on my own. The idea is very simple every assembly machine produces not only the product that it is set to but also some waste. Waste can be used as a fuel source (burned) or recycled in a recycling plant. Recycling waste would give you resources back and decrease pollution.

You could also expand this concept to chemistry plants and liquid waste (toxic water), that then can be recycled into unusable chemicals.

There would also have to be some balancing, to not break the game. For example, the amount of resources you can gain from recycling or the how much recycling decreases the pollution. You would also have to look some of the crafting recipes behind technologies that have to be researched.

I think the biggest challenge in creating this mod would be changing the production buildings to producing waste and adjusting the pollution levels.

My question would be, is this mod possible to create? Is it even a good idea for mod?

Looks like Bio-Industries
viewtopic.php?f=93&t=17548

I always thought that Bio Industries was more focused on environmentally friendly alternatives to produce. My idea would be more focused on managing the managing your waste products.

Technically, this is very easy to implement, even for someone with little programming knowledge, because the beginner modding tutorials cover all that one needs.
a) Create the prototype of all waste products you want to have
b) Create recipes that take the waste as input and assign them to be craftable by some crafting entity
c) Modify the desired recipes to have the desired amount of the desired waste product as output

Unfortunately, I do not think this will be as exciting as you think it will be, because the recycling will be straight forward, i.e. you will just build one single factory loop (most likely powered by bots to avoid the needless belt hassle) and never think about it again. This would not add any challenge, just tedium. Effectively, this is simply a change in the cost of an item, which might as well be baked directly into the recipe.
Assume a recipe requires iron plates and produces X amount of iron waste product. Further, the whole recycling mechanism converts Y amount of iron waste product back into 1 iron plate. This would mean that the effective cost of the initial recipe is X/Y iron plates lower. Might as well just reduce the recipe cost and increase the pollution / energy consumption of the assemblers.

Note that the mechanic of side products itself is actually quite interesting, but not if it just produces "waste". E.g. in Bob's / Angel's mods, you can smelt lead, which requires oxygen (fluid) and produces molten lead and sulfur dioxide. The sulfur dioxide is a useful product in and of itself, required in a variety of recipes, not just some "waste" that has to be processed in a boring, linear fashion.