Hi.

I've been using Realistic Reactors for quite a while now and also - since about a year - in combination with Krastorio2 and Nuclear Fuel mods.

It works great as an intermediate step between the burner/solar and fusion power. However, it's not practical to end the game nuclear-only.
You need at least 15GW of excess power. So the transition to fusion is a natural step. For fusion you need tritium. There are two recipes available:

1) Conversion from U-235 at a ratio of 1:5. That's probably what most players do.
2) A by-product of the reprocessing of a spent regular nuclear power cell - however only with 15% probability.

I would like to use use recipe (2) more for various reasons.

However the recipe (2) is not really practical. It's quite enough to provide power for your spidertrons and your own portable generator, but you just can't get enough tritium to run a fusion power plant.

The problem is the efficiency of the RR - it is always at least 50%. This results in you getting only a modest amount of tritium unless you spam the map with reactors. At the same time I understand that just allowing the efficiency to drop will penalize new players who can quickly loose their stock of the hard-earned U-235.

So I have a proposal:

Currently RR has efficiency that goes up from 100% to 200% and then falls down to 50%. The temperatures of the transitions depend on the neighbor bonus to the point that with 4 neighbors the last transition is not happening at all and reactors just run at 200% until the meltdown.

My proposal is to allow the efficiency to go significantly lower if Krastorio2 mod is detected. I am currently piloting a change where I changed the lower cap from 50 to 5% which leads to quite high attrition rate of fuel cells. However, as said, this is risky for new players. Also this is not much of a challenge.

Therefore I'd like to change the mechanic a bit:
* 1 reactor will behave quite similarly to what it does now - it will stay at at least 50%
* 2 reactors will eventually dip down to 33% at something like 850 degrees (and stay there).
* 3 will reach 25% at the approx 950 degrees (and stay there).
* 4 will reach 25% at 950 and 5% at 1000. Or may be even 5% at 990 and 1% at 1000 though, I'm not sure that we need to go that low. The point here however is that it should keep decreasing until the 1000 degrees providing the incentive to push even closer to the boundary.

This therefore keeps new players in safety (they only have 1 or 2 reactors). The experienced players then have a choice of either running more reactors in some safe[er] mode or less reactors at the brink of meltdown.

If you would agree to accept such a change, I volunteer to write the corresponding lua code (I think of using a look up table instead of hard-coded math that is used now).

What do you think?

The efficiency charts would be something like this (capped at 200%):
[img]https://i.ibb.co/S0N96N1/rr-eff-proposal.png [/img]

Generated the charts that I thought about. Will try them out:

https://i.ibb.co/88NJCJS/image.png

UPDATE: embedded that data into the mod (I'm using a lookup table). Will test run it for some time, then report back.

Tried beating Krastorio2 without building antimatter reactors. My nuclear reactors were running most of the time with 20% efficiency or more, dipping to lower levels for only a short time.
The amount of produced U-235 is insane, my change to the efficiency charts completely disbalanced it. So while I still find the smooth charts to be nice - there is no need to go that deep with efficiency. Unless we also want to rebalance the breeding ratios of Nuclear Fuels overriding the Krastorio2 tweaks applied to it.

Yeah, balancing is tricky, there are so many mods with different fuel cells and recipies... I used to play with GotLags Nuclear Fuel mod, and with a good breeder reactor setup, you can get to self sustaining power generation with no need of mining new uranium...

But feel free to mess around with the outputs: Power, efficiency and BonusCellAmount are all calculated in one function: calculate_stats_ingo in formulas.lua file.

Terminology below: K2=Krastorio2, NR=Nuclear reactor, BR=Breeding reactor, RR=Realistic reactors mod.

I am now more-or-less done with my changes. I have beaten the K2 third time and got my second "Fusion is for men" achievement. I don't think that the fourth time is coming soon. Results:
1) I think, I was able to improve the player experience during several phases of the game (see below).
2) I have also built a particular power plant that I consider that can go as a challenge goal and fine-tuned my changes to make it possible to gain the "Fusion is for men" K2 achievement while having 1 breeder reactor BR per 1 fusion power plant.

The problems that I tried to fix:
1) I have noticed that in my playthroughs I don't use BRs for breeding and NRs for power but rather freely exchange one with another. The slight power difference is easily offset by building just a single extra reactor. I wanted to rebalance that.
2) I found the 100-200-50 efficiency charts to be way too artificial. I also didn't like the sudden jump in reactor power as it goes over 500 grad celsius.

The problem that I thought that it is in the game, but it happened to be not there is:

3) I found breeding of deuterium (K2 item) to be extremely difficult and wanted to relax that. That happened to be a bug in either K2 or in Nuclear Fuel (NF) mods though and only when "alternate fuel cycle" is selected in the settings. That bug is now reported.

==== Short overview:
I was specifically focusing on these 3 mods playing together: K2, RR and Nuclear Fuels.

The stages that I was able to identify are:
1) Very early game. Your single NR and a few heat pipes connected to it are cold. If you are new to RR, then you probably won't notice much, but if you build a huge heat pipe network from the beginning then you'll get penalized. Reactor gains power very slowly while it's cold. In exchange - you also don't need to hover at exactly 200% efficiency, if you want to squeeze every last bit of the juice out of the scarce U-235 you have. The window of optimal performance is smooth and much wider than in stock RR

2) Early game. You slowly grow your nuclear power plant but your energy demands outpace your energy production. You slowly raise the temperature of your NRs to mitigate that. U-235 is still scarce. Doesn't differ that much from stock RR except for smooth efficiency charts and that it slowly becomes easier to gain more power (the power charts are not quite linear)

3) Mid game: MOX fuel is researched. You already have 4 NRs approaching maximum performance. With MOX your power problems are resolved for some time. I don't think there is any significant difference from stock at this stage. Except, again, for the efficiency charts. With stock you pretty much max out the efficiency until the end of the game, with my changes you are now past the peak efficiency, but still quite good in that regard.

4) Mid-late game: BR is researched. Your power problems are solved again for some time as you can breed Plutonium and with that you get enough MOX to not think about it for some time. This is the time where the differences start be more pronounced. If you try to breed plutonium in your NPs then you quickly realize that you need much bigger power plant - you won't be able to get as much power from the breeding reactor. The BRs are even worse in that regard, but since you build them not for power - it doesn't matter.

5) Late game: K2 singularity labs are researched. Your power demands go through the roof, building more NRs become impractical. You have to go fusion. Your existing breeder section might or might not be enough - depending on your harness you might need either 1 or 2 BRs

6) Very late game: going for K2 "fusion is for man" achievement. It's possible to have only one BR per fusion power plant, but it would balancing on the knife edge. I lost count of how many meltdowns I had while I was designing the acceptable fusion plant harness. It's also fun to have BR as part of the harness because it needs it's own harness as well if you don't want problems. BRs are also significantly less tame than NRs in that mode - the power curve bends quite a lot up.

================

Resume: I think that it might be worth to pack this together as a challenge mod. If you like my changes - we'll integrate them back into yours and discontinue the dedicated mod. Or it might stay as is. What do you think?

BTW I think that it might be interesting to have a "white" and a "blue" power cells. This way we get same color scheme as the Factorio itself:

1) White/light-yellow (standard, recolored). Stock factorio nuclear power cell.
2) Blue (speed/power) - 50-100% less energy, 50-100% more power, more pollution when reprocessing. A bit of U-238 in products and occasional (10% chance) plutonium.
3) Green (efficiency) - MOX fuel, 25-33% less power, same reprocessing products as standard.
4) Amber (production) - breeder cells. 50% less power, U-235 in reprocessing products.

The blue cells will then come as its own research at about the same time as the MOX. They are are a double-edged sword because U-235 might still be scarce at that point.

I have published a "test drive" version as https://mods.factorio.com/mod/RealisticReactorsForK2

If you want, I can mark it deprecated so that it doesn't show up in public listings. Unfortunately, one can't freely switch back and forth between the two - reactors work, but you loose the reactor UI after the switch.

Please let me know, what you think.