When i started reading the mod description and see pictures, the idea of the mod started to come together in my head, blending the beacons into buildings they affect. But then i read further and the idea strayed further apart from what i thought it would be.

• What is the reason for separate new kind of productivity modules? The beacons are about speed, number of machines is the same, i don't see why you would need new kinds. There are also mods that add productivity modules. Maybe you are including productivity modules in the building recipes, it is unnecessary for the purpose of just removing beacons off landscape.
• About different tiers, i thought this is about "how many beacons there are affecting the building". Not about module tier used in the beacon. It would be a waste of power using tier 1 or 2 speed modules in beacons, so noone does that. Generally used beacon tiers are of 8 beacons or 12 surrounding a building in case of assemblers/furnaces. Of course it's difficult to say how many beacons on average there is because different recipes need different amount of buildings. But even starting from 8-8 beacons is very expensive in midgame so i start with beacons on 1 side only, that would be 1 example of tier 1.

Other idea i had was to simply include the empty beacons in the building tiers, but then have extra row or 2 of module slots for the beacons. Then player could still use whichever module tiers they want or even efficiency modules in the mix. So that would mean 3 rows of module slots, first for the machine and then beacons. That would be 28 slots for a tier 3 beaconed assembler (12-beacon setup). But maybe this scenario is what you wanted to avoid, it's also understandable.

The productivity modules made a lot of sense when I started implementing this a year ago when Factorio didn't support entities have their own productivity bonus. However, I still like the idea of the modules as you can put them in vanilla entities as well.

You are right that using T1 or T2 speed modules in beacons costs a lot of electricity, but that's what I do quite often. T3 modules are SO expensive, and I generally get T3 productivity first with T1 speed modules in beacons, and later upgrade the speed modules...

Of course one of the huge downsides of removing beacons and moving them inside of machines is that you lose all this granularity - being able to choose how many beacons per machine etc. I'm personally fine with it this way, and adding more variants would just flood the crafting menu with many entities with tiny differences, not to mention they would have to be visually distinct as well.

new idea: modules that turn the building into a beacon, buffing adjacent buildings too.
either using the graphics from this mod or a little beacon built onto the machine.
you'd scan for the new modules and spawn an invisible beacon

That sounds quite cool but I'm afraid that's out of scope of this mod, please make another one :)

On the public servers that I used to play, T1 and T2 speed modules were used extremely frequently in beacons and other entities before we reached T3 and the production capabilities to craft them. So I can't say I agree with that point, but of course mileage may vary depending on the player.

The only gripe I have with this mod is the fact that modders had to "make do" with the colors (i.e. shiny bobs gfx) with the resources available to them. V453000 was able to "I hacked together some basic graphics for it from some special passes (height and Ambient Occlusion) that we use for postproduction in our gfx workflow." which I assume made it a lot easier ;)

:D Thanks for confirming that T1 and T2 modules are useful,

but why is it a gripe that I did extra effort to utilize our images, and set a friendly license that allows anybody to re-use them?

Ah no, it was more like a nod towards the other modders that achieved slightly less than on-par results because they didn't have the assets for all those years. It's such an incredibly small thing, it was more of a jest.

Aside from that, I'm having really great fun with this mod. The base looks so much cleaner without all those beacons. The only way I'll remember in the future of how great this mod is, would be if/when you decide to stop updating it for future versions. Thanks, it's a really big boon!

You complain about a lack of granularity for tweaking speed and I find I'm having that same problem a little with the peak-end of the machines. Rather than having a specialist speed 3 assembler for when a recipe can not use productivity have half speed modules, this also lets you use those same half speed modules in the other things, miners, centrifuges, pumps if you'd rather do that than use productivity for them (+20% productivity from modules is nothing compared to infinite research but +40% Speed makes smaller ore patches viable) or simply can't use productivity for that recipe (nuclear fuel for example) then I could to varying degrees also tweak the speed of the lower machines too, if I need an extra little bit of speed I can put half speed 3 modules in a speed 2 machine, etc.

The reduced granularity is almost inherent for this mod. I could of course all possible combinations of all possible machines, but I'd find that going way too far.