This modpack is still in early alpha, and may have game-ruining bugs. I haven't played a full game with this modpack yet, and neither has anyone else.

Desolation is a modpack that challenges you to radically rethink your logistics and factory design. Desolation is inspired by Freight Forwarding and gets most of its content from Industrial Revolution 3.

The general progression will look familiar if you've played Freight Forwarding and IR3. See the diagram above.

To use this modpack:

1. In the in-game mod browser, press the top-left checkbox to turn all mods on, then press it again to turn all mods off.
2. Install Desolation. This will also install and enable all non-optional dependencies.
3. Look at the optional dependencies of Desolation, and consider installing them. (The Production Scrap mod and Harder Basic Logistics mod will make your production lines more complex. The other optional mods are for improved graphics: Gore, and Alien Biomes HR Terrain.)
4. Enable whatever QOL mods you want, such as Recipe Book, Factory Planner, Picker Dollies, etc.

How this modpack works:

• You start off on an island with some resources. You explore distant islands to find new resources.
• You build your base in warm regions, which are surrounded by areas of snow and ice. You can only build in the warm regions. Nothing can be built on snow or ice, except rails and rail signals.
  • This makes it impossible to use traditional factory architectures like the loathsome "main bus" and "city blocks".
  • You must therefore build your factory as a network of outposts connected by railroads, shipping lanes, and airship routes.
  • Power poles can't be placed on cold terrain, so each part of your factory will need its own power production, using either locally sourced fuel, or by shipping in charged batteries, steam cells, barrels of fuel, etc.
  • To move resources between these warm patches, you'll first have to manually transport them in a vehicle, then you'll unlock trains, then later you'll get access to ships, and finally airships. There are also transmaterialisers (teleporters).
• Enemies can spawn anywhere there is darkness, because the modpack includes my other mod BREAM. Destroying enemy bases is not enough to be safe, as pollution can still cause enemies to spawn in any dark region.
  • As you cannot build lights on cold terrain, enemies can always spawn in the snowy regions. Every single factory outpost will need sustainable defenses.
  • You'll have to build lights throughout your factory, to stop enemies spawning in the middle of it.
  • As enemy nests are usually in snowy regions, you can't use turrets to destroy them. Instead, you'll need vehicles, grenades, capsules, and power armour.
• The core of the modpack is Industrial Revolution 3 by Deadlock989. This is an overhaul mod that completely changes almost all of the machines and recipes.
  • The game starts with a steam-powered phase. You'll only get access to electricity after you get iron, easily 10 or more hours into the game.
  • To get iron, you'll need to build a heavy roller vehicle, drive across your starting island, set up a mining outpost, and manually transport the iron ore back home in your vehicle. Only after this will you be able to research basic rail.
• Evolution only increases when you research certain milestone technologies. Evolution is not increased by pollution or by destroying bases. So you should take your time and develop fully at a given tech level before researching more.
• You can research seismic scanners which can map entire landmasses, and ocean scanner pods that can map large regions of the sea. (Both of these ideas were stolen from Freight Forwarding, but the code is new.) There is also an early technology that will automatically map your entire starting island. This makes exploration much more convenient, which is necessary because your factory will have to span large distances.
• You will need to pack items into containers to get reasonable throughput on trains and ships. Stack sizes of raw ores are low, but processing them (by crushing or smelting) will increase the stack size, and containerization will boost it further. (This modpack uses the Intermodal Containers mod, like Freight Forwarding.)
• The endgame has been slightly extended, so that winning the modpack requires all end-game techs. Launching a rocket is not enough to win the game. Instead, you must secure two new end-game resources, and use them to research long-distance transmaterialisation to beam yourself back to Earth.
• There are some minor changes that make the game significantly more challenging:
  • At the start, you won't have access to liquid water, so you'll have to mine ice and melt it.
  • No fluid wagons or fluid tankers. Instead, you have to use barrels and canisters.
  • No solar panels. For power you'll need to use coal, charcoal, coke, petroleum, ethanol, and eventually nuclear.
  • No tiered or infinite research. No mining productivity bonuses, ammo damage bonuses, etc. (Version 1.0 will probably have bonuses for player mining speed and inventory size, in some milestone techs.)
  • Optional: Compatibility with my other mod Harder Basic Logistics, which can change underground transport belts to have length 1, and remove long inserters. This makes the usual row-of-assemblers design impossible for many recipes, to make factory design less monotonous.
  • Optional: Compatibility with my other mod Production Scrap For IR3, to add scrap byproducts to many recipes.

All of the features listed above are already implemented, but may have bugs and balance issues. The remaining work before version 1.0 is mostly finding and fixing bugs and oversights in progression, techs, recipes, etc., as well as some balancing and tuning - size of warm patches, scale of islands, amount of ice produced, research costs, size/richness/frequency of resources, nerfing flamethrower turrets, etc.

Contributing: Feel free to try out the modpack and report bugs. You are also welcome to share ideas/thoughts in the discussion tab. If you are a modder, feel free to make changes and send a pull request.

If I lose interest in working on this, or disappear off the internet, you are welcome to fork and modify this modpack.
You are also welcome to copy features (such as the seismic/ocean scanners, or the terrain gen) for your own mod/modpack.

Some possible additional features which might be implemented before 1.0:

• Copy the life-preserver ring from Freight Forwarding, in case the player runs out of fuel over water. Only allow it after the naval engineering tech is researched so it doesn't break progression.
• Science pack rework: possibly replace IR3's material-based science packs with field-based kits (ballistics, mechanics, electronics, chemistry, etc.) each having multiple recipes. As you get access to more materials, you unlock alternate recipes for each of these kits, using your new higher-tier resources. Techs require science packs that make logical sense.
  • As a result of this, more science packs will be available early in the game, so early-game bases will have to be more complicated.
  • For example, the first-tier ballistics kit is made from stone bricks and shotgun shells. Then later you get a recipe to produce the same ballistics kit item using iron magazines and concrete blocks. This allows you to do "demand-side resource balancing" by choosing to what extent to use each recipe.
• Tree system rework: possibly produce placeable trees by sifting through gravel to find tree seeds, and combining with sand and bricks. This could ensure that it's impossible to run out of wood on the starting island.
• Terrain gen optimization: The custom terrain gen is more complicated than in base Factorio, so I suspect it may cause lag, especially if multiple seismic scanners and ocean scanners are active simultaneously. Lagging terrain gen can cause these scanners to detect land/water incorrectly. Fix this with some kind of global limit on scan speed, and maybe try to optimize terrain gen by reducing the number of named noise vars, etc.
• Add the Explosive Biters and Arson mods, or implement changes similar to those, so that factory design needs to consider prevention of uncontrollable fire/explosion chain reactions.

Re licensing: all code I wrote is MIT-licensed unless otherwise noted in the code (because some of it is copied from other mods). All the graphics included in this mod are MIT-licensed, except for the seismic scanner graphics which are taken from Freight Forwarding (made by modifying vanilla sprites), and the sprites for ice and glass bottles (modified vanilla sprites). The mod re-uses some graphics from IR3 (for the ice melters, and the brick wall, and the pit); I do not own those graphics and they are not included in this mod (Desolation).

Things possibly of interest to other modders/modpack-makers, even if you aren't interested in contributing to this one:

• When starting a game, set water scale to around 50% and reroll the seed a few times. Also go into the settings menu and enable the "complex terrain sliders" setting. Two things to note:
  • On the starting island, the mod generates circular land arcs leading to resource patches. This is done by computing the distance from each point to those circular arcs, and by using the map seed to generate random noise-vars that are constant everywhere on the map. See the code in code/data/terrain/ (e.g. the mapRandBetween function). This is a technique I haven't seen any other modpack use, and it's nice for generating random terrain that's still guaranteed to have certain features.
  • Except on the starting island, some resources, like copper and tin, will never generate close to each other. This is because the mod picks a random vector and uses it to divide the map into 4 quadrants, with copper only spawning on 2 opposite quadrants, and tin only on the other 2 quadrants. In fact the mod uses 3 separate resource-type layers. Layer A spawns copper+iron on 2 quadrants and coal+tin on the other 2 quadrants. Layer B spawns gold + fossil gas on 2 quadrants, and oil + sour gas on the others. Layer C spawns uranium and immateria on separate quadrants. The layer B and C resources also appear only beyond some minimal distance from the starting island. Each layer has its own random angle for splitting the map into quadrants. This is all done so the player has to spread their factory across multiple islands to get all the resources they need.
• The file code/data/additions/auto-debug.lua automatically searches for issues in progression, such as recipes being unlocked before their ingredients are available. Consider copying the code or implementing something similar for your modpack. Turn on the isDebug flag in global-params.lua to run these checks.