Maybe 2.0 is just a beginning? Come on digging further ideas 😊

Vancedrayton on Reddit suggested an idea I keep in my mind for a long time – add new tiers of drones and depot. Let's discuss pros & cons?

1. • From one point of view, this can make the mod a more native part of the game, naturally embed it in different progression levels. New tiers of depots allow to use more drones at once, but also cost more advanced ingredients.

2. –/+ It will complicate the flow. Personally, I'm not a true fan of too much content, but considering popularity of K2, IR2/3, Bobs, BZ mods with overwhelming amount of things, many Factorio players like it.

3. –/+ It will require to turn off customizability, at least the recipes. Sounds like a fair price!

4. • New tiers may be a separate, patch mod, so that you can keep using fully editable version.

5. – The first actual con. For now, the concept of new tiers doesn't seem to be profitable, it helps to overcome no challenge. Because drones are really easy to scale up comparing to mining drills, and if you have one depot, you can simply put additional ones as they don't occupy much space.

5.1. + I have an idea of limiting to 1 depot per ore patch (more probable some minimal distance to a depot ) to enforce the need of upgrading to new tiers. But not sure if players or even I will like this 🤔 The original idea behind mining drones is to simplify ore mining process, and if I complicate it this was, then what's the reason??

6. + FreekillX1Alpha on Reddit suggested a tier for burner stage, which seems to be quite sensible thing. So, having 2 tiers, burner and electric?..
I can imagine the late-game tier with drones and depots of high durability and even consuming no electric energy cuz they have a portable reactor in each, but again, this seems a bit meaningless.

7. + Modules. As Vancedrayton noted on Reddit, it's too cheap and cheaty to have several modules for a whole ore patch, but it's possible to allow 0 modules for burner tier. 1 for the electric tier, 2 for some advanced tier. And I guess I can 50% or even 10% efficiency of modules effects to make it less cheaty and allow inserting 2-3 times more modules.

8. + Drone tiers. I've got an idea for them also: let's have corresponding 3 tiers of drones. What's the difference? Now drones benefit from 2 researches: new mining speed tech and vanilla productivity tech. Prod research also applies to burner drills, so I think it's fair to allow using it for all the drones. But, the gain by mining speed research could be limited for lower drones, so that 1st burner tier drones benefit from up to 3 level, 2nd electric tier gain from up to 5 level, and only the last advanced 3rd tier gains from infinite levels of mining drones speed research.

Feel free to share you thoughts! Also you can vote here: https://take.quiz-maker.com/poll4827930x4e7748b8-149

A way to quickly put ores back in the mining outpost would be nice if it is possible.

If you accidentally deconstruct an outpost with 10k of ores, which spills on the ground, and you gather it back, your only option to put it back into the outpost is to manually drag each stack of 50 ores into the outpost, as shortcuts like ctrl-click or shift-click do not work.

R4d6, hah, that's a true pain, I know! 😅 Never thought about fixing this, but I'll investigate, thanks for the idea! And I think it's better to create new discussions for such different ideas.

Well, having a look at all the mentioned details, now idea of tiers looks mature! Especially in combination with overhaul mods that provide long burner stage and a super-late stage which can benefit from 3rd tier. Tiers require many hard changes in the code to make them this different and independent, I'll try to think about this code changes and move step-by-step on my free time.

It would be cool to add nice balance (required technologies and recipes ingredients) with huge mods like SE / AAI Industry, K2, IR2 / IR3, BZ, Bobs/Angels, etc., but I haven't even tried most of them, so volunteering to help with balance is highly appreciated! 🙌

R4d6, Btw, I implemented this feature in the latest v2.0.12! This is really handy: whenever you open a depot, if you have ore of its current type, it will be instantly moved from your inventory into depot's output stack. So that now you can easily move a depot: grab all its content, put into chests, pick and place depot, the collect chests and simply click depot to put resources back into it.

Nice~