E-Tech: Vanilla Recipes for AAI Industry + QoL Toggles
Likes AAI Industry's new machines, dislikes its recipe rewrites? This mod restores vanilla recipes while keeping everything AAI adds — plus a handful of optional quality-of-life toggles.
Everything is a startup setting, and every recipe change is guarded so it never fights another overhaul mod (see "Plays nice" below).
Recipe restore (the core feature)
- Restores 45+ vanilla recipes AAI changed back to their vanilla ingredients: transport belt, inserters, mining drills, furnaces, assembling machines, steam engine/turbine, engine units, concrete, oil processing, labs, science packs, electric poles, roboport, radar, turrets, gates, armor tiers, vehicles, and more.
- Science packs are hand-craftable again (AAI makes them assembler-only).
- Keeps all AAI content untouched: burner assembling machine, burner lab, burner turbine, industrial furnace, area mining drill, fuel processor, concrete/steel walls and gates, stone path, small iron pole, motors, glass, sand, stone tablets. Their recipes stay AAI's — they're new items, that's their design.
- Tech tree untouched. Research progression, unlock order, triggers — all remain AAI's. Recipes simply cost vanilla ingredients once unlocked.
- Krastorio 2 aware. With K2 (and K2 Spaced Out) installed, recipes restore to K2's values, not raw vanilla — i.e. the exact state a K2 game had before AAI was added. Names/icons AAI reskinned (engine unit ↔ "multi-cylinder engine") are restored too, and AAI's redundant duplicate recipes (e.g. its "single-cylinder engine" and "electronic circuit (wood)") are hidden from the crafting menu.
Optional tweaks (each its own startup toggle)
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Pick up & re-place the crashed ship | on | Crash-site spaceship parts become minable and get placement items |
| Allow all modules in beacons | on | Every beacon accepts every module type, productivity and quality included (modded beacons too). Beacon strength unchanged |
| Allow quality in asteroid crushing/reprocessing | on | Enables quality on all asteroid crush/reprocess recipes so quality modules in the crusher take effect |
| Nuclear fuel stack size | 1 (vanilla) | Set any stack size 1–1000 |
| Artillery shell stack size | 1 (vanilla) | Set any stack size 1–1000 |
| Agricultural science pack spoils | on (vanilla) | Turn off to stop agricultural science packs from spoiling |
| Restore nuclear fuel crafting (K2) | off | Brings back the vanilla nuclear fuel item/recipe that Krastorio 2 hides, unlocked by Kovarex enrichment as in vanilla. Off by default — hiding it is a deliberate K2 balance choice |
| Teleport-to-player shortcut | off (experimental) | Toolbar shortcut for multiplayer: one other player online = click teleports to them; several = a picker window opens |
| Teleporter pads | off | Buildable teleporter pads (chemical science tech) — walk onto one, pick a destination from a map GUI. Port of Teleporters by Klonan (LGPLv3 — see LICENSE-third-party.txt) extended with: energy cost drained from the destination pad (map settings, 0 = free), cross-surface teleporting with a surface filter + custom surface display names, a wireless-remote toolbar shortcut, a free return teleport with live camera preview, and your team's players in the list. Coming from the original mod? Run /etech-migrate-teleporters while both mods are installed — placed pads (names included), inventory items, and research carry over; then remove the original |
| Resource map markers | off | Auto-tags resource patches on the map: one marker per patch with icon + total amount (oil shows well count and average yield). Updates as you chart and mine; delete a marker to mute that patch; /etech-markers-rebuild rescans. Written from scratch for E-Tech as a 2.1 replacement for the abandoned Resource Map Label Marker mod |
| Total productivity | off | Productivity modules allowed on recipes the game normally forbids — belts, inserters, rails, pipes, solar, walls, ammo, equipment — with four category group toggles. Port of Total Productivity by AivanF (LGPLv3 — see LICENSE-third-party.txt); auto-skipped if the original is installed |
| Jetpack fuel HUD | off | Needs Jetpack. Movable in-flight window with fuel, count, burn bar, and remaining flight time. Port of Puppy's Jetpack UI (MIT) with the window-position reset bug fixed and no flib dependency; auto-skipped if the original is installed |
| Uranium bacteria on Gleba | off | Needs Space Age. Mirrors iron/copper bacteria: jelly → 1% uranium bacteria (Jellynut tech), bacteria + bioflux → ×4 in a biochamber (Bacteria cultivation tech), spoils into uranium ore. Port of the abandoned Simple Gleba Uranium by cindersash (MIT — see LICENSE-third-party.txt); saves from that mod keep their items |
| Void chest & void pipe | off | Cheap void chest (destroys any item put in) and void pipe (destroys any fluid pumped in), unlocked by a small early tech. Port of Easy Void by zoryn (MIT); prototype names unchanged so placed voids from the original survive the switch; auto-skipped if the original is installed |
| Edit map settings in-game | off | Toolbar shortcut opens an editor for map settings (pollution, evolution, expansion, peaceful/no-enemies, spoilage rate) and per-surface map gen settings; applying requires admin. Port of Edit Map Settings by Morsk (MIT) with the top-left mod-gui button replaced by the shortcut; auto-skipped if the original is installed |
| FPS-friendly thrusters | off | Removes the animated exhaust plumes from space platform thrusters — the big FPS drain on large platforms. Port of FPS Friendly Thrusters by RockPaperKatana (MIT); auto-skipped if the original is installed |
| Pass-through fusion generators | off | Fusion generators get input-output plasma connections on all four sides so they chain without separate plasma lines. Port of pass-through-fusion-generator by daahl (MIT); auto-skipped if the original is installed |
| Colorful biochamber | off | Needs Space Age. Recolors the biochamber's pools, dome and windows per recipe so you can tell what it's making at a glance. Port of Colorful Biochamber by meifray (public domain); auto-skipped if the original is installed |
Stack-size and spoilage defaults match vanilla, so installing the mod changes nothing until you move a slider or flip a switch — safe to share with friends who want different settings.
What the recipe restore deliberately does NOT do
- No tech/progression edits. Pipes etc. still unlock via AAI's research.
- No removal of AAI items/machines.
motor("single-cylinder engine") and friends stay craftable — AAI's own machines use them (e.g. fuel processor = iron 10 + brick 10 + motor 1). boilerisn't touched (AAI's ingredients already equal vanilla).offshore-pumpingredients left as AAI's (vanilla 2.x values unverified; both versions are cheap).
Plays nice with other overhaul mods
Every recipe restore is guarded by a fingerprint check: a recipe is only touched if it still matches AAI's version or contains an AAI-only item (motor, electric-motor, stone-tablet, glass, sand, …). If another mod — Krastorio 2, for example — has already rewritten a recipe into something else, E-Tech detects that and leaves it alone. Krastorio 2 and K2 Spaced Out are optional dependencies so E-Tech loads after them and sees the final state. All decisions are logged; search factorio-current.log for [E-Tech].
Known quirks (by design — tech is out of scope)
- AAI's basic-logistics tech trigger is "craft 50 motors" — still required to unlock belts, even though belts no longer use motors.
- A few recipes unlock before every vanilla ingredient is available (e.g. inserter needs electronic circuits, which unlock slightly later in AAI's tree). Nothing breaks; you just craft them a bit later.
For developers / friends who want to tweak
- vanilla-recipes.lua — the recipe data: recipe name → vanilla/K2 values + AAI fingerprint. Add/remove entries freely.
- data-final-fixes.lua — the engine that applies the restores.
- beacons.lua, misc-tweaks.lua, crash-ship.lua — the optional tweaks.
build.ps1— packagesE-Tech_<version>.zipinto your Factorio mods folder and archives a copy inreleases/.
License
None (public domain). Do whatever you want with it. Exceptions: the ported features listed below keep their original licenses — full texts and per-port modification notes in LICENSE-third-party.txt.
Credits — mods absorbed into E-Tech
E-Tech carries forward these abandoned/orphaned mods as optional toggles. All credit for the original ideas and code goes to their authors:
- Teleporters by Klonan (LGPLv3) — teleporter pads
- Total Productivity by AivanF (LGPLv3) — total productivity
- Puppy's Jetpack UI by Puppy (MIT) — jetpack fuel HUD
- Simple Gleba Uranium by cindersash (MIT) — uranium bacteria on Gleba
- Easy Void by zoryn (MIT) — void chest & void pipe (in turn credits JDOGG, Optera, kendfrey, Rseding91 for the original void mods)
- Edit Map Settings by Morsk (MIT, a fork of Change Map Settings by Erik Wellmann) — in-game map settings editor
- FPS Friendly Thrusters by RockPaperKatana (MIT) — plume-free thrusters
- pass-through-fusion-generator by daahl (MIT) — pass-through fusion generators
- Colorful Biochamber by meifray (Unlicense) — per-recipe biochamber colors
Inspired-by (rewritten from scratch, not ports): Resource Map Label Marker — resource map markers.
Source code: https://github.com/restjack/E-Tech
This mod was developed with AI assistance. If AI-assisted development is a deal-breaker for you, please simply avoid using this mod.