Factorio Forums

Why another boxing mod?
I tried some other boxing mods before and I decided that I wanted to do them in different way.
Boxing is same as always(50 item per box), but to reuse box you need to gather whole stack of used boxes(100).
Also making one box is not that cheap(13 iron and 1 raw wood) and it takes long time.

Target structure of base needs to be a little different to not waste tons of resources,
and here comes:
Central Recycle Station
To make most use of boxes I suggest making one place where you recycle those boxes,
which can lead to very interesting belt designs, or very powerfull robots factories.

What can you put into box?
I decided to make a little larger pool there, so you can pack:
iron and copper ore
iron and copper plates
stone and stone bricks
raw wood, coal and solid fuel
steel, iron gears and copper cables
all 3 tiers of circuits
batteries, plastic bars and sulfur


Balance notes
I think that current box resources and time costs are high enough to pay for more storage space you can get
and the comfort of transporting resources around base.

Short how-to
Research technology, it's green tier.
Now you can make green boxes, then you pack resources into them just like barrels.
Unpacking works also like barrels, but you get red boxes out of them,
which you need then recycle (simple recipes to use in assembly machines)
Currently there is no loss in whole process.

Download
I tested it a little on 0.11.21, if there are any bug feel free to inform me, I'll try to fix them as soon as possible.

Version 1.0.1
Notes: Added missing locale for item-group. Changed to new icons (by Cipherpunk). Old icons are available in icon/backup folder. Version 1.0.0

Sounds promising. I will give it a try.

Stupid question: what was your reason to make the box not reusable? It sounds for me just like an unneeded step...

It is reusable after a bit of recycling/processing.
I made it so it's better to do one big "make box useable again" station than making many local assemblies for that

Now this! This... Is usefull! Mind if i put it in both modpacks ?

Go ahead, it's okay.
Also if you guys have any feedback about balance or anything to say, then tell me about it

I still haven't had a chance to test this out for balance but I really like it. It feels powerful but takes time to get running.

The only thing I don't like so far is the number of steps it takes to recycle boxes. Really, it seems like it would just increase the size of the recycling center without adding much gameplay. I'll have to test it out some more, though.

Also, I've made a whole set of graphics for your mod that I'm really proud of. I wanted to PM you about it but I haven't been active enough in this forum to earn the privilege. If you're interested, let me know the best way to send the pack to you. And let me know if you have any suggestions about how I can improve it.

Cipherpunk wrote:I still haven't had a chance to test this out for balance but I really like it. It feels powerful but takes time to get running.

The only thing I don't like so far is the number of steps it takes to recycle boxes. Really, it seems like it would just increase the size of the recycling center without adding much gameplay. I'll have to test it out some more, though.

Also, I've made a whole set of graphics for your mod that I'm really proud of. I wanted to PM you about it but I haven't been active enough in this forum to earn the privilege. If you're interested, let me know the best way to send the pack to you. And let me know if you have any suggestions about how I can improve it.

It's intended that recycling center has to be bigger than 1-2 machines. It's all about making multiple recycling centers quite bad, but if you have only 1, then it doesn't matter if it's 2 or 4 machines, right? Also if I'll get better at modding I could make new buildings to make it more attractive.

Nagshell wrote:It's intended that recycling center has to be bigger than 1-2 machines. It's all about making multiple recycling centers quite bad, but if you have only 1, then it doesn't matter if it's 2 or 4 machines, right? Also if I'll get better at modding I could make new buildings to make it more attractive.

Gotcha. That actually does sound good and I have a suggestion to help reinforce that idea: add a small and different resource cost at each stage of the recycling process. This wouldn't be intended to make a drain on the economy but it would force people to use belts between recyclers instead of just inserters. Just enough variation to make it a small challenge to plan for scaling up later would probably be fine.

New version 1.0.1 added in main post.

You do me a great honor, sir.

Just downloaded and I'm getting an error on startup "File__CentralBoxing__/graphics/icons/UnBoxAdvCirc.png" not found.

Weird, I can see the .png is in the folder, too.

Edit: Oops, that one was my fault. UnboxAdvCirc.png needs to be renamed to UnBoxAdvCirc.png. Sorry!

Strange, I don't have this error even with wrong file name
If it's not working for someone else also, I'll reupload it.

Might be windows/linux difference - on linux letter case matters which can cause a bit of pain with filenaming.