Hello, I was wondering if you were planning on making this fun mod compatible with space exploration? And possibly also "early spidertron for space explortaion"?

Carl is mostly feature complete at this point, I don't really have a lot of further plans with him, some tweaks to movement speed maybe still. I achieved what I wanted to and I'm pretty happy with where it is. I don't use those mods so I'm not sure how much work it would take to add compatibility.

Well it's just a matter of which technologies unlock the different tiers and so on. I managed to tweak those things in my own custom mod so no worries there!

Oh cool, that's awesome. If you're willing to share those adjustments, I can figure out a good way to send it to me and I can incorporate it into a build with credit to you. I've been avoiding SE because it looks intimidating (and I want to finish a vanilla-ish run before using a significant overhaul like this one)

Yeah I can definitely do that! Especially when the new Factorio update comes out I'll probably have to rework my modlist quite a bit.

Also, I did find an actual crash error with space exploration. When I view a different surface on SE with the satellite functionality, it gives a crash. I uploaded the crash report screenshot here: https://i.imgur.com/ajBTegb.png

When I went into the control.lua and commented out that particular function on the line it talks about, the crash doesn't happen. Is that function very important to this mod? Do you think you have an idea what might be happening?

For context, when you look through the satellite it replaces your player character entity with something else.

The genesis of this mod was taking Spidertron Engineer and refactoring the code a whole bunch because it was pretty close to what I wanted to start with, but I wanted to strip out all the "you ARE a spidertron" bits. That being said, I'm not sure how important the new surface parts are to this mod anymore. I think the intent there was to ensure that if/when you went to a new surface (there was some in-built support for SE) that a spidertron would be properly spawned if you were inside it.

I think it's probably safe to strip that part out entirely, since it's giving a lot of problems, or maybe figure out a way to delineate when a surface is loaded but a player isn't being placed on the surface itself (in the scenario you described). The hard part for me personally is that I don't use any of the mods that use new/different surfaces so it's going to be a bit more difficult for me to test what the effects are of a particular change. I will take another stab this weekend at stripping out that function so the mod is at least stable.

I appreciate your patience with me! Full transparency, I lost a bunch of work that was supposed to go into 1.3.3 originally, so I've been pretty bummed/avoiding Factorio because of that, but I will make every effort to at least get you all stabilized so you can continue enjoying the mod while I pout.

On the SE integration side, I don't have the code in a repo yet but I'll get that setup this weekend too and if you're comfortable you can make a pull request with the SE changes. I'll let you know when that's ready.