Okay, so first of all: love the mod! I play it with dredgeworks, so all the "peaceful" resources are underwater, and land-bound resources have to be fought over. The resource droppings are also quite nice, and I like the active resource farm potential.

However, the resource farm potential is too strong! o.o
Triggering the nests makes them spit out a couple of biters, before they go dormant. When I first encountered this I simply underestimated the biters (they are roughly 3-5 times stronger than other biters of similiar evolution BUT they have neither spitters nor worms, so that's a plus. But after advancing through the tech, I realized two things: disabling the projectiles in their current state isn't really optional (I play with stable foundations that are completely overpowered vs normal biters when used for turrets, but against resource projectiles it makes them hold out 3 shots instead of 1), and the other: these nests go dormant no matter wether my player dies or not.
I trigger them, they send out a wave of biters, then they go back to sleep and full health. I might get damge checked (i.e. the nest counts me as inactive if I haven't killed a biter in so long) but then again, they are 3-5x stronger than normal - and with my mod setup I don't even encounter uranium biters!

Now I don't mind any of this really. But in the long run I need to know wether I found a bug (likely an incompatability thing I'm wayyyy to lazy to figure out, but I do play with a lot of mods), or if this is intentional, OR if I simply misunderstood dormancy, and I need to... constantly mine while also attacking them? melee the nests?

Looking forward to suggestions and ideas on how to continue from here.
If anyone is looking into using this mod as a resource farm: use waterfill or "biters hate concrete" I don't think I ever saw a mod add affordable turrets able to handle with this on its own^^

Hey, thanks for playing my mod! I added the whole resource drop thing as an afterthought, so its cool to see someone using it! I'll push out an update to allow players to modify how long the biter nests go before going dormant (they do indeed go dormant if no biters have been killed recently).
I'm not sure what would be best for the projectile thing though. I could add a variable to how often/damaging the projectiles are if that's what you're after.
Let me know!

The easiest option for now would probably be a damage multiplier setting for the projectile, letting everyone find their own sweetspot.
Next it would be nice to know more about their range. With my mod setup I actually have no trouble to go near the nests or biters by myself, but I can't let turrets fend for themselves (with or without projectiles) so if the projectiles only fired a certain distance, I could setup turrets beyond that, and lure the biters there myself. Honestly that approach might even open up Artillery again!

Finally, you confirmed that nests go dormant if no biters have been killed recently - a completely sensible approach imo. In what way does distance to player/distance to nearest structure factor into that? The description says the nests heal up in-between artillery shots. Could I combine a couple of turrets hundreds of walls, and let artillery deal the main damage? Would I, as a player, need to stay close to that? Or the other way around, if I loaded myself up on Exoskeletons, could I run circles around the biters, keep the nests active and let artillery deal with all that?

The artillery comment was because dormant nests have at least a 100x regeneration rate, artillery should work great on active nests. I actually checked the code and it only goes dormant if it hasn't spawned a biter in sixteen seconds. In a vanilla fight that would be impossible to not have happen, but maybe another mod is messing with the respawn rates for nests. Take a look at this video and confirm the biters are behaving like this: https://youtu.be/26Yc8YdFEIY

Oh! so if I don't die, I can simply lead the biters away so they have space to spawn again? (rn I box them in with waterfill, but my current research level isn't enough to simply mow the boxed biters down with turrets)

That might work. Biters might be tied to their original nest regardless of distance, or they might become unattached a certain distance away. I might check to see if its possible to give dormant nests a few defender biters for farming as an option.

oh that would actually be the dream! :D
Having defender biters for farming would be soooo cool.
Also the distance thing might be me confusing factorio and minecraft mechanics, because in the process of trying to clear an iron patch I got caught up in the feeling of building a minecraft iron farm - and in minecraft spawns are very location based, so if you lead all mobs away from somehwere, new mobs will spawn there instead; I don't actually know Factorio spawning mechanics, since the mods that encourage mob farming are few.

Okay, just pushed a new version. The projectile chance is by default 0.16, and it can be set as low as 0.01. The dormant biters can be set from 0-100, and honestly any more than five is a lot to handle.
I'll say this because I did not know it for the longest time: You can change the mod global settings without making a new map. (In the main menu you hit: Settings -> Mod settings then change whatever values you want. Then when it reloads you open the same save file, and it will ask you if you want to "Sync mods and load" or just load, and press Load and you'll see the new changes.)
Let me know how it goes!

holy shit you're awesome!
I will <3