As you may have noticed there haven't been any updates to this mod in the last few months. I had hoped to eventually pick up active development of this mod again but I am sad to say this won't be the case for the foreseeable future. At this time I cannot say IF I will be able to continue working on this mod, let alone WHEN. Therefore the development of this mod is on-hold indefinitely.
For those who want to know why, there are a couple of reasons for this.
The first reason is simply time and real life. Working on this mod has taken too much time away from other things that are important in life and I can no longer justify the amount of time spent on this project. I currently have real life priorities that take precedence.
The second reason has to do with the scope of the project. This project has grown too big and complex for me to efficiently handle. Because of the complexity of the underlying systems, and the fact I am not a professional programmer, things like; bugs, compatibility with other mods and the (unintended) side-effects of making changes swallow up way more time than I had anticipated. If I had to rebuild this mod from the ground up I would make different design- and programming decisions. Before I published this mod I had been working on and off for years on it, and in that time Factorio itself and the features of its API changed a lot. As a result there was a lot of technical debt and especially the Factorio 2.0 update broke so many things in this mod. And that brings me to the final reason.
The third reason is that working on this mod was no longer fun for me. After publishing this mod most my time was spent hunting down bugs, testing solutions and dealing with compatibility issues with other mods. It started to feel like a job instead of a creative endeavor and at some point I just felt burnt-out on modding, and maybe even Factorio itself a little.
I find it regrettable, but this is the truth of it. If anyone wants to continue my work, or use parts of my work to create something new, they are more than welcome to do so. Maybe I'll pick up development on the mod again in the future, or create something new, or nothing at all, I simply don't know. All I can say for now is that there will be no further development. To those who have shown their support and interest in this mod, thank you.
