Hi Stringweasel !

I'm currently working on BioIndustries, and created 3 custom menu simulations myself, and Pi-C noticed that for these, you don't need some included files like preview.png and locale, so if you remove those, you can gain at least 10M (estimated). I wanted to try and load some of the bigger saves in your mod and remove parts the world so that you only load what you see. What do you think?

Hello snouz! When I looked into the file sizes at the start of this year I found that the largest influence is the level.dat files. At the moment I'm ignoring the locale and preview files. I will look into that again at some point, but I don't think that it would make much of a difference. As for the removing parts of the world, I'm already doing that :P That's why it takes so long to add more bases, sometimes it takes me up to 10 hours to remove the outside world while keeping everything running nicely (and indefitely). This takes saves from 50MB (or over 100MB!) each down to less than 5MB. If I didn't do that this mod would already be well over 1GB, while now it's fairly small at less than 90MB.

But thanks for trying to help! I always appreciate the feedback. And if you want you could maybe help me reduce new submissions in the future :)

Oh I didn't know, it's true saves can turn out huge :)
I noticed something though. Vanilla simulations only have the level dat file, so I tried removing everything from zips except level dat and levelmetadata, and it seems to work just as well !
You save about 35 M that way! Notice that level.dat files are very compressed, like 16M zipped = 4M but png images are almost not compressed and are pretty big (because a complex png has almost zero redundant data). Some level-init dat were even bigger than level.dat, and apparently don't have any impact on simulations.

I'll test them later tonight when I'm back home, but the current size of the whole mod is 48.3 M after my savagery, if I confirm it doesn't remove important data.
I also noticed you kept some saves dependancies, so those could be removed by resaving.

Also, unrelated, would you be interested if rework the mod icon a bit? I've done a number of them that you can see here: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/MbrTestMod

Oh wow! That's awesome, well done! You're welcome to fork my repo and do a pull-request, and I'll push the release. If I get around to do it myself I'll mention you in the changelog anyway, but I'm not sure when that will be :)

I really like the look of the icons you've made! I was close to complimenting you about your mod's aesthetics after your first message. And my icon is still what I quickly made the day before I released it, so I'm definitely interested! I already have an idea for a new icon though. Do you have Discord? I go by stringweasel there too, maybe we can chat?

Sure !
I think I need a number too.
snouz#0489

BTW I've managed to compress further using the console and /editor. For example, xterminator had a second surface, "space". Some had blueprints, that I removed with "/delete-blueprint-library everybody confirm" (one of them had a wall of names that had blueprints, and it took most of the space). I managed to get the whole mod under 30M, but I still need to correct some of them (I croped 1-2 a bit too much and a few other problems)

I reached out to you on Discord.

And wow, honestly didn't think that was possible!