Hero Turrets Redux (Langmans Fork)

Your turrets carry salvaged, self-learning AI from your ship. The more they fight, the deadlier they get — kill enough enemies (or optionally deal enough damage) and a turret automatically promotes itself, in place, into a stronger version of itself, no rebuilding required.

This is a fork of HeroTurrets_Redux by fortheking55 (itself a port of the original HeroTurrets by btarrant for Factorio 2.0/Space Age), continued and extended as a separate mod (HeroTurretsReduxFork) for Factorio 2.1.

How ranking works

Every turret starts at rank 1 and can be promoted through six ranks by default:

Private 1st Class
Corporal
Sergeant
General
Field Marshal
Supreme Commander

By default, promotion is based on kills: 150 / 1,000 / 2,500 / 5,000 / 10,000 / 20,000 kills for ranks 1–6. You can optionally also enable "Rank by Damage", so turrets that deal a lot of damage without necessarily landing the finishing blow (e.g. against tough enemies) can still promote once one of their kills pushes their total damage dealt over a rank's threshold.

Everything about ranking is configurable in the mod settings:
- Custom rank names (up to 12), replacing the default six.
- Custom kill and/or damage thresholds per rank.
- A global "Rank Modifier" to scale all thresholds up or down.
- Separate kill/damage multipliers for ammo, fluid, electric, and artillery turrets.

What a higher rank gives you

Each rank adds a percentage bonus, building up from about 12% at the first rank to 60% at the top rank by default. Unless you set custom values, the same percentage applies across the board to:

Damage dealt
Max health
Range
Fire rate / cooldown
Attack (turret rotation / aiming) speed

Each of these can be given its own independent custom bonus curve in the settings, and there's a separate "Rank Buff Modifier" to scale all bonuses up or down globally.

What happens when a turret ranks up

The promotion happens instantly, in place — no downtime, no manual rebuilding. The mod swaps the turret for its higher-rank version (using the game's native fast-replace where possible) and carries over:

Loaded ammo, fluid, and stored energy
Current health (unless "Set Health to Max on Rank Up" is enabled)
Kill/damage counters
Priority target list and "ignore unlisted targets" setting
Circuit and logistic network connections and their conditions

If you have rank-up notifications enabled (on by default, per player), you'll see a floating rank name and a brief light flash above the turret, plus either a local sound at the turret or a clickable alert (your choice), when it promotes.

Picking up ranked turrets

The Kill Counter setting controls what happens when you mine/pick up a ranked turret:

Fuzzy (default): the turret keeps its rank, but its kill count resets to just enough to justify that rank rather than the exact number.
Exact: the turret keeps its precise kill count (and damage dealt, if "Retain Damage Counter" is also on), stored as a tag on the item. Because each item can carry a different exact count, this can result in several separate item stacks in your inventory.
Disable: the turret loses its rank entirely and reverts to a plain base turret when picked up.

Two more settings affect ghosts and blueprints, both disabled by default (meaning ranked turrets are downgraded to plain base turrets in these cases unless you turn them on):
- Allow ranked ghosts — lets construction robots rebuild a destroyed turret at its original rank instead of from scratch.
- Allow ranked turrets in blueprints/copy-paste — keeps a turret's rank when it's blueprinted or copy-pasted.

Turret & mod compatibility

Supported turret types: ammo, fluid (e.g. flamethrower), electric (e.g. laser), and artillery turrets — both vanilla and most modded turrets, including Space Age. Artillery turrets have their own on/off toggle since ranking them up can't use fast-replace; if you disable artillery ranking after already ranking some up, those turrets need to be picked up and placed again to revert.

Not ranked, by design (matched by entity name, not a hard mod-name check, so this list is best-effort):
- Turrets from the Water Turret mod (water/steam turrets)
- Turrets from the Vehicle turrets mod (vehicle-mounted gun/rocket turrets)
- Meteor-defense turrets, most likely from Space Exploration (unconfirmed which exact mod)
- A "big artillery turret" from an unidentified mod (couldn't be confirmed via the Mod Portal)
- Shield domes and creative-mode turrets

Yuoki Turrets is listed as an optional mod, with a compatibility fix dating back to before this mod's Factorio 2.1/Space Age port — it has not been re-verified against current Yuoki versions on 2.1, so treat it as untested rather than guaranteed. The Concentrated Solar and a Zeus Turret mod are intentionally skipped until their known issues are fixed.

In-game wiki (Informatron)

If you have the Informatron mod installed, this mod adds its own set of help pages to it — covering ranks & promotion, rank bonuses, what happens on rank-up, how picking up ranked turrets works, and turret/mod compatibility. Informatron is entirely optional; without it, nothing changes.

Translations

Fully translated: English, German, French, Dutch — mod settings, the rank-up alert, the Informatron wiki pages, the mod name/description, and the attack-bonus modifier text. Other languages currently fall back to English.

One thing translation can't reach: the default rank names themselves ("Private 1st Class", "Corporal", etc.) are generated as plain text in Lua, not through the locale system, so they always display in English (or whatever you set via the "Custom Ranks" setting) regardless of game language.

Credits

Original mod: HeroTurrets by btarrant
Factorio 2.0/Space Age port: HeroTurrets_Redux by fortheking55
This fork (Factorio 2.1): Langmans