Hello,

as its a nice little (logical) mod addition, i want to suggest to add some additional resources to servicing-recipes
lubricants, at least the all around base servicing.
a service pack for servicing (some plastic / battery /electrical-engine)

Looking at the code it doesn't look like there's a difference between normal and expensive. Both are iron gears and a circuit.

I like this idea., but with a twist: servicing a bot costs lubricant, but ~95% fixes it and ~5% creates a "critically damaged bot" that requires a sercvicing pack.

@MatthewJMimnaugh: That's a beautiful idea and I might use that for "expensive" mode.

Edit: Investigating this, there's no way to make recipes produce an A or B result. If I made a 95% result and a 5% result, then there's a chance the recipe could produce both a fixed bot and a critically damaged bot or nothing at all.

Haha, that is both funny and ridiculous. Perhaps a different approach: repair crafting creates 1 "gutted bot" and 95% to create "repaired component"? Fixing the bot requires one gutted bot and one repaired component OR a bot-specific repair pack (1 of each component that is required by the original bot crafting recipe)? Might be a workaround :)

So I'm thinking:

Damaged bot disassembly -> Shell + internals (95%) + powercell (95%)
Electronic circuit + gear -> Internals
Battery -> Powercell (I don't like single ingredient single use recipes, but this is mostly for mods that might not use batteries in bots)
Shell + Internals + Powercell + lube -> Bot.

Seems needlessly complex, but I suppose that's what players on Expensive mode desire. What are your thoughts?

Oooh! I like this (maybe even have a 99% for the engine too, just to be annoying)! You are right, though: 1. needlessly complex is fun and 2. there will be some weirdness for modded bots. Would that essentially just read the recipe, extract the relevant parts required for construction, and add those into internals and powercell automatically? If so, that is pretty clever.

It would also be nice to have an ability to modify different rates of failure too for different bots (namely for super expensive and refined modded bots like the ones that require a fusion core for low rates and high rates for early game moded bots), but that would probably add a new level of complexity to the programming.

Now I have this weird idea of assembly machines breaking and requiring servicing in the same way, getting turned into a broken machine marked for deconstruction and a matching ghost for a working machine. But that probably is fit for another mod.

The best way to handle this would be to add remote calls so mods could register their own bot failure rates and possibly even their own repair recipes. But I highly doubt any mods would use it. I mostly play on vanilla and try to keep my code as general as possible so it (usually) works with other mods.

I doubt I would use this method as I'm sure mods would complicated it, it could technically be possible to return 95% of the flying robot frame ingredients, and simply expect the player to rebuild the robot entirely. I imagine this would get complicated for mods, as I'm decomposing an ingredient rather than the bot itself so I'll need a really good method for identifying the expensive component of the robot and not the inexpensive one like the electronic circuits. Or... I could just use the method I described.

Maintenance madness does the machine maintenance. Could take a look at that.

That does sound interesting. I think it would have to tie in with the number of recipes completed, but would also have to account for the difficulty or the recipe. That is a cool concept, but I think it would have to be implemented in the main game to be effective---like a new flag for all recipes that indicates difficulty. Buildings could then have a reliability rating, and a formula would determine the breakdown rate. Given the nature of the game, I could see that being a nice feature---not to mention another use for repair packs (or a new, special type of "servicing pack")---especially since it would be another distinct advantage for bot networks.

Would you like me to suggest it as a feature for the main game?

Also, @ZombieMooose, I checked out Maintenance madness and it seems pretty cool. My only gripe is it is kind of superficial and really only runs on a clock, rather than any awareness of what is being crafted. Definitely a cool concept, though. I like the idea of things breaking down :)

Probably a balance between features and UPS. Might be a better way to work do it though.

The update is here! Following the previous trend, desired difficulty can be customized so you can enjoy the hard version without making everything expensive.

I'll take Maintenance Madness for a spin and depending on how that runs, I may or may make my own version of that styled after Bot Servicing.

I took a quick peek at Maintenance Madness and it's definitely not my thing. Stone furnaces asking for electronic circuits! A roboport start makes it possible to service them without going nuts, but the costs are completely insane.

I'd just return the initial ingredients and tweak the crafting times a bit. Probably use a furnace-like device since there's no need to set the recipe.