Someone recommended this mod while discussing my Bot Servicing mod and this sounds cool so I gave it a spin. Unfortunately, it seems like a a real hassle early game. Early on ASM1s and stone furnaces were regularly requiring machine oil, which I did not have, and some other bits that made fixing damaged machines prohibitively expensive. I took a peek at some of the recipes, and like for example reconditioning a beacon requires roughly half the resources of a beacon, plus a toolbox, which in turn requires about 1/3rd of the resources of a beacon!

I could see maintaining a solar field becoming prohibitively expensive as well. Vanilla Construction bots use 5kJ/m, so traversing a single roboport construction area costs 1MJ for the trip and return trip. Assuming even distribution of panels (so the energy cost is half) and one roboport hosting about 250 panels, that's about 0.25MW of maintenance for a single roboport of solar panels. If solar fields are multiple roboports of distance away from the cleaner, this cost is even higher! Solar panels already are a huge investment due to their high cost and relatively low yield.

It's a great concept and I can appreciate the detail in how machine age is tracked but the costs make it difficult to play with.

Hi Mylon, Balancing this mod is challenging issue, that's for sure. In the recent update, I've added a new GUI to manage material demand for each of your machines. If you don't want to use some items for certain machines, you know are able to disable them.

Regarding the energy demand for maintenance: I think it's ok and not too much. If one trip costs 1MJ and two trips are needed on average for every 12 min, then this is less than 10% of the ~25 MJ the solar panel produces in this time. Maybe I'll reduce the energy demand in a future version, but at the moment I think it's not on the main list of issues.

Thank you again for your feedback!