Dear Szentigrade, ty for the mayor work of upgrading this old mod to space age factorio.
I did this mod back in the days and well didnt have time to upgrade it with the perpetual changes of factorio.
So I greatly appreciate your hard work I actually downloaded claude yesterday to update the mod pack but found this so didnt bother.
So Ill play this one and see where your design philosophy differ from my original ideas of the mod.

I found one thing this far that, white belts require crude steel plates and they are needed for more advanced belts.
My original idea was to replace all this linear progress to a do what you want progress.
Thats why my idea for belts was to use construction material, machine parts and for underground belt explosives analogue.
This generalises the inputs, so you can make basic things of buildings, etc from copper or cobalt steel or gold if you want it.

For more advanced belts there was a engine component (havent progressed that far yet)

As for waste rock I put the stack size at 25 so you run out of inventory space so you are forced to crush it to raise stack size to 200, and if you keep on crushing to gravel and sand you get higher stack size and force you to appriciate storage spaces, Thats why I made that part annoying.

As for some science I wanted to have AI as a control unit for factorys but the main cost of AI isnt input, its energy thats why I put high craft times and high thus energy cost of sciences.

It seems that fluid mechanics makes steam power a bit inefficient the burners seems to be off balance ill look into it when i made more progress in burners etc.
But the shifters (they got a silly picture) are for sure way to quick, to sift out platinum from sea water isnt that uhm likely but he its an alien planet. I did put in the effort to sift out uranium and platinum out of seawater but it was probably 10000 slower then current game.
Thus bit forcing you to get inserter capacity problems by flipping nickle ore in order to produce catalysts, it was modeled on the highest platinum content of ores from some south african magma deposit ore strain (if i recall correctly). You could manually move it between factories to speed it up but to automate it it was designed for annoyance.

Same mechanic was for a nuke to produce explosives just to illustrate the absolutely insane difference of energy density between coal and of uranium (3million times more energy)...
Also made the higher belts insanely pricey just imagine a underground belt compared to a robotic belt highway of like 50m high n wide or something for capacity.

One idea I wanted to put in was different factory shapes and sizes, I thought tetris shaped factorys and other components to force people to build differently.
a really long one, a jagged shape, a early stalin factory of 5x10 or something silly with mediocre production capacity.

the conceptual idea for the sulfur, coal, iron steel production chains was to have tier 1 as tech of 1600 century earth, then 1800 pre bessemer and then steel revolution with bessmer process, to modern steel.
And then some sort of future tech like amorphic metals, nanotubes etc.
And of course a lot of routes bypass and just makes shit better, nanotubes are bonkers, and so is making cables from steel (i used conductivity for materials for cables)

Anyways Thank you so much for your effort you are awesome!

So did a quick run of this build. I did come changes after to sort some problems and some of these problems was due to shifts in base games fluid mechanics.
I also had a later version that had some of these sorted.
I could start editing but I wont, its your project your work and I respect that. If you dont have time I respect that to.

This far
Balancing:
1) White belts cost crude steel plate (aka ironplate), add a recipe for "normal" steel into it, give 2 white belts per steel.

2) Add 1 explosive costs on underground belt 1, 10 for tier 2, 100 for tier 3 etc.

3) Start with 1000 explosives unit

4) Bitumen Coal energy should be 2,5 GJ not 3.5 MJ.

5) Unlocking automation science pack by crafting mark 1 lab didnt work had to cheat that one in. That lab should have 500 Kw in cost.

Currently energy is bad due to new fluid mechanics, its annoying to modify those steam engines to get correct values.

6) But in general tier 1 burners should be 2x more yield.

If first steamgenerator is about 1MW.
Then second tier should be 50 MW.
Tier 3 is largest of current generators of 1500 MW, it should cost about 250 ton, 25 construction materials, 100 machine parts, 100 pipe parts 50 electric parts.
Tier 4 steam put in a 20 GW for about of advanced material. 50 construction materials, 500 advanced machine parts, 200 pipe parts 100 advanced electric parts.

7) Shifters should be slower and go up with tiers giving speed of 1 5 25 125 and 4x of costs in material last one advanced parts.

8) Graphic errors on AI training facility and shifters.
9) Heat entalpy recipies converting it to "solid fuel".

Future things that 10 years of humankind (and Alien Musk) development.
Rocketsilos tier 1-4 with speed from 1 to 4 where tier 3 should be the planned around startships weight and fuel requirement.
tier 4 should be space elevator that requires insane amount of carbon nanotubes. And a speed of 125 requiring far less fuel.

"/szentigrade @ proton . me"/

if you got mail. you can edit it away.