Hello!
With SE being updated to 0.6, the logical progression of the new cores doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. A few things that are notable that are all direct results of the SE 0.6 changes include:
- The "3 core fragment to 3 unique cards plus vulcanite" recipe uses vulcanite core fragments, rather than "generic" core fragments (which no longer output vulcanite). Perhaps this could be redone to instead output pyroflux?
- Tier 1, 2, and 3 catalogs require any one, two, or four (respectively) SE-specific cores, but the options do not include vulcanite or cryonite cores. With the moving of utility and production science to space, vulcanite and cryonite are now both required relatively early, and use off-homeworld resources.
Additionally, Tier 4 catalogs completely ignore SE-specific materials and instead totally switch gears to requiring four specific vanilla cores (uranium, iron, copper, and crude oil). I have two possible suggestions here, which could be used individually or together:
1) Include coal and stone cores as possibilities, making it so any four of the six cores are allowed to make an insight. Coal cores in particular could be very useful for a fuel planet, as crude oil cores can also be.
2) It seems backwards to me that the vanilla-related cores are only required in the highest-tier catalog while no SE cores are required. My thought is that there could be three "tiers" of cards: "Navuian" - come from generic core fragments only, "Simple" - any cores whose primary resource is not required in any of SE's "flavors" of catalogs, and "Advanced" - any cores whose primary resource is required in SE's catalogs (Beryllium, holmium, iridium, and vitamelange). Given these tiers, the first catalog could have three Nauvian and one Simple, the broad catalog could have two Nauvian and two simple, or two Nauvian, one simple, and one advanced, the comprehensive catalog could have one Nauvian, one simple, one advanced, and the fourth can be simple or advanced, and the extended catalog could have one simple and three advanced.
A few other suggestions I have are listed below. If these are too much work or don't fit in your vision for the mod, then by all means - feel free to ignore them! I certainly won't tell you that you "must" include them - do your mods the way you want and they're still awesome! :) That being said, my suggestions are:
- Require Utility and Production science in the research cost for at least the higher three tiers of catalog, if not all four
- Have four tiers of environmental science packs, the same way the SE families do. These packs would, by default, only be used in furthering additional research along the environmental path.
- Integrate environmental science with Deep Space (and optionally, matter or optimization if playing with K2). I gather that the intent is that the environmental branch should be optional, so any science packs or insights should not be required in order to advance to deep space. But I still think there are some ways in which environmental catalogs could be integrated with deep space. Some examples include "recipes that use deep space catalogs can give double output if an extended environmental catalog is added", "new higher-efficiency recipes such as 99.9% junk data reprocessing can be researched using environmental and deep space science packs", "deep space catalogs can be used to make even higher efficiency significant data recipes if mixed with environmental catalogs", and "some recipes that use naquium plates can use 25% fewer naquium plates if an extended environmental catalog is added.
- Stacking support - integrate with mods such as this one (https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Deadlock-SE-bridge) to allow for stacking of insights
