After a few months of being off of Factorio, I came back and wanted to get my feet wet with the game by going through the tutorials. There's a tutorial stage where you immediately need to build an offshore pump, but you need to create automation cores to do so; based on everything that I can tell, you can't create an automation core at all with what they provide you (I tried building a lab but that didn't give me the ability to research how to create them).
I'll just disable mods from now until I complete the tutorials, just figured that I'd notify you all in case someone else runs into the roadblock (or if there's some way to fix it so that you don't have to disable the mod). Thanks!