Hey Avadii. I recently learned you made a rebalance mod after a discord user commented about it with my own space age rebalance mod that I coincidentally published in the same day. He was commenting on how our approaches are totally different.

This isn’t a criticism/commentary on your choices. I just wanted to make you aware (YT comments are chaos), as you might be interested to compare. Seeing what you discuss on your YT channel, the changes you made make sense.

I don’t want to plug my mod in your forum, so please delete this thread after reading it. If it is not deleted soon, then I will delete it myself.

Hey, no need to remove it.
Interesting ideas however I don't want to tinker with established game mechanics which is why I will stick to pure numerical balance changes.

Maybe I'll try your mod at some point. Seems fun!

Thank you for taking time to respond. I appreciate it. I looked more through your mod, I have a few comments, if you are interested.

1. My changes to rocket turrets and gleba evolution are mostly motivated by your pentapod defense video.
2. While our methods differ, I agree with your efforts to reduce productivity and reign in quality. These two really allow too much snowballing because the numbers get too big.
3. Infinite prod potency reduction. I think this is a very good idea. I had discussed exactly what you implemented with Boskid back in July, and he said he would rather change the cost of the techs, to prevent breaking changes. He proposed changing the scaling exponent from 1.5^L to 1.5^(2L) = 2.25 ^L. I implemented this now in my mod.
4. Rockets more expensive: I thought about doing this just for Vulcanus. Seeing your implementation motivated me to instead give the materials for rocket parts greatly reduced rocket capacities, to specifically punish using imported rocket parts over making them locally on each planet.

About your mod specifically, I was poking through the files, and I have two recommendations (since this appears to be your first mod).

Some mods delete vanilla prototypes, which will cause your code of: data.raw[“lab”][“biolab”].science_pack_drain_rate_percent to crash. In general, my recommendation is to do something like:

if data.raw[“lab”][“biolab”] then
   data.raw[“lab”][“biolab”].science_pack_drain_rate_percent = 60
end

This pattern will make it so when another mod deletes a prototype (in this case the biolab), your mod won’t cause a crash by trying to modify data.raw[“lab”][“biolab”] when it is nil. Having your mod’s name start with an “A” actually protects against this a lot, but may not be perfect. Just a heads up if you get crash reports.

Second: If you include a changelog.txt (formatted in the standard way) inside the mod folder, then you can pull it up from the mod portal and in game. Example. This matters more if you plan to do many revisions.

Anyway, I look forward to seeing the video I assume you will make about your mod on your channel.

Hey, I thought about null checks like you describe.
The problem is: if someone tinkers with the game by removing mechanics like the biolab he's not really playing my mod is he?
The mod is supposed to rebalance the vanilla game not some other overhaul gamemode.

So if it crashes it's most likely because this mod is not supposed to be combined with overhaul mods.
And since this behaviour prevents crashes I don't even get reports about it if for example vanilla version 2.0.xy crashes.

But I will keep an eye on this matter.

if someone tinkers with the game by removing mechanics like the biolab he's not really playing my mod is he?

No. It’s more a matter of people installing poorly made mods that do naughty things, as opposed to overhauls specifically.

this mod is not supposed to be combined with overhaul mods.

This is a normal and totally logical response. Many users simply have highly unreasonable expectations, mash together mods, and expect them to work. When factorio crashes, Factorio explicitly tells the user to report it to the author of the mod causing the crash.

You don’t have to provide this compatibility. I’m just letting you know so you aren’t caught off guard, as this can also happen outside of the case of overhauls.