I'd say this mod is quite overpowered:

1. Normally you are limited by the space you can put miners on, making it so that the size of an ore patch limits the maximum "throughput", with this mod, you practically do not care at all how large or small an ore patch is. This also makes you less inclined to mine off of multiple resource patches to make sure you have the throughput that your base desires, because just more siphons will do the trick.

2. The extra pollution generation is almost negated because you can mine from far away. Putting the siphons in strategic locations means the pollution will evaporate along the same chunks normal miners would. The "almost negated" part is because the pollution generated will still affect biter evolution.

It's just some food for thought here. I do realize that the increase in power required means more coal gets burned and therefore even more pollution. That's also why I put the questionmark in the title. Expansion however really doesn't seem necessary until the ores are completely depleted. I'm liking the mod but I definitely felt like it was a powerful tool to get right off the bat with the stats it has.

Perhaps a good suggestion would be to have multiple tiers so you have to earn your way to a good version of this siphon. Perhaps start off with a less efficient one all the way to a more efficient one than the current one with space tech. Or perhaps with a tradeoff such as no specific modules until the higher tiers or what have you. I guess creativity is the limit in this regard. It's all up to what you want to do with it. I do see a lot of potential in the mod though, I hope you feel inspired to keep improving on the concept.

Hi! You have some good points, but first I want to explain a little where I'm coming from.

One of my iterations leading up to this mod was a Satisfactory-like resource node system. Where you have a small number of nodes, but each node is fairly high output and entirely infinite. By Factorio's conventions, Satisfactory's resource systems is 'OP' but honestly, I much prefer it over Factorio's style.

Or put it another way: the point of this mod is to deemphasize mining, and thereby allow more emphasis on the production line aspects of the game. Without negating it so much that you no longer need outposts.

On throughput:
You do have a good point here. I could go back to a literal translation of Satisfactory's resource mechanics which would solve this, but that has its downsides with Factorio's mapgen/autoplace system - it's hard to get it very consistent, and ensure the starting area doesn't have too much or too little. i.e., Factorio's really built around making patches rather than small numbers of nodes.

That said, I do have it working 'good enough' that it could be an option if the current system really just doesn't work. But it definitely has its own pretty big downsides.

On the other hand, the current system mostly follows Satisfactory's system 'in spirit'. It definitely makes mining a much more minor part of the game, while maintaining the need to set up outposts. Just it uses Factorio patches instead of Satisfactory nodes.

For pollution:
For this I'm a little more hesitant. The siphons still need to be in sight range, it's going to be pretty hard to not trigger biter attacks. A very dense forest may be able to eat it, and maybe that would be a good reason to tweak up the pollution a bit - but I'd also prefer to not take it to utterly astronomical levels just to negate a game mechanic. Still, if you have a save where you're harvesting resources with no pollution reaching nearby biters, feel free to share it and I'll take a look - and see if I can fine tune it for that situation.

Modules:
Modules are already mostly disabled for the siphon. This is more for technical reasons, however - the siphons have an 80 tick cycle to bring in ore right as the production cycle runs out, and productivity and speed modules mess with this. As far as balance goes, maybe it should stay like this as a tradeoff for the siphon's power.

Tiering:
This is definitely something I'm thinking about. My preference would be if I could find a way to tie it to research, so I don't clutter up the game with extra entities. The problem with that, well, there's not an easy way to tie range to research. Maybe I could have the range start smaller and scale up with mining productivity, as the game does allow mods to read that...

--

Whew, that was a lot. Anyways, thanks for the feedback; it does give me more to think about. I do want this mod to be somewhat balanced, just within the understanding that moving emphasis away from mining is the point of the mod.

Thanks for the reply here. Some good food for thought, and gives me some good insight on your intention for the mod. Sadly, aside from a few goofy lets plays, I don't know much about Satisfactory (And I'm not that interested as I find Factorio to be a superior game in a lot of ways).

So some of your references towards those mechanics aren't easy for me to understand in terms of complexity. I understand what it means for something to be infinite but having a game built around it of course changes the dynamic of playstyle, and from what I understand here, that's your intent with this mod. There are other mods out there that have infinite resource options such as bobs/angel and RSO by itself, but those are a very passive set of changes while your approach to infinite mining is an optional feature (building) with some downsides, and currently not truly infinite.

So, am I understanding this correctly here? :P

There's a mod called https://mods.factorio.com/mod/warptorio2 , while I'd rather not explain the core concept of that mod because it's out of the scope of this discussion, it has a whole lot of researches regarding mining productivity efficiency. I think it's 5 for each tier (tier 1 being only red science, tier 2 being red + green etc.) and it works in the same way as the current vanilla mining productivity, so it's +10% per upgrade. +10% per upgrade, 5 per tier is a massive buff (So +250% at pre-space techs, and the vanilla researches are still there too.) it works very well with the core mechanics of the mod and doesn't feel overpowered because of it.

However, something like that would be overpowered for a mod like this in the way it is currently, because you don't just get "For every ore you mine, you get 1, 2 or 2.5 for free!", you get it at the same speed. This is very powerful in terms of throughput, but it works for that mod because you're on a time limit before you have to pack up.

I'm mentioning that mod here with the way it adds mining productivity because it might be something you'd like to integrate into tiering, or have the current siphon be 2/3/4/5x as slow but with many mining productivity researches so it eventually mines as fast as you'd want them to at the extra plus side of starting to get closer to infinite mining, depending on how far you're going to take the productivity researches of course. Something to be said about the satisfaction of reaching a milestone of researches. Factorio does it well with the sounds and flashing research bar.

There's a mod called https://mods.factorio.com/mod/vtk-deep-core-mining , in later versions he started adding things that you're probably not interested in, however, the core concept of this mod solves your mentioning of Factorio's mapgen/autoplace system (if I understand correctly what you meant by that).

To put it short, for every ore tile that gets depleted, there's an X% chance (10% default, configurable) for there to spawn a relatively larger tile of infinite resources, that's only mineable with his mining building. So you could interpret this as a slightly more fair way of the default angels/RSO's infinite ores everywhere. So his method solves any mapgen concerns as it builds on it. Perhaps that's something worth as food for thought towards solving any of your other ideas that were having issues regarding mapgen.

There's one more tip in case you want to get nuts with tiering or experimenting with things. Factorio can at most handle 1 item per update. (Or I should say, finish 1 recipe per update) So if you want to experiment and see how fast you can get a siphon to create items, 60 per second is the most (Assuming 60 UPS). However, it can drain more than that from an ore patch, which is something definitely undesired. This limitation is hard coded and modders work around it by, for example, making recipes take 10x longer to craft and yield/cost 10x the resources. This thing that I'm talking about is very easy to reproduce by just modding something to craft super fast or have like an OP super beacon setup.

In terms of pollution,
I also played a bit more today with this mod and the cost of energy does seem to solve any concerns I had, the extra requirements for boilers itself was already a strong offset even if the siphon sent out only half the pollution it does now. My initial findings were too short it seems.

If I'm completely off the mark here regarding what you tried to convey to me, I blame my lack of knowledge regarding Satisfactory. :P Good luck!

Ah, if you decide like that "Spawn infinite patch when the patch disappears" is a good idea, you could have it like he has it so it cannot overlap, then you could also choose to have the infinite patch be very large in size and change the chance to be like 100%. That way you can make sure that throughput can't get to unintended levels:

1. You force an infinite patch to spawn.
2. Cannot overlap with other patches.
3. Make it a very large infinite patch.
4. 2&3 ensures only 1 infinite patch can spawn on an ore deposit unless that deposit is huge.

This way you can almost finetune how much throughput you'd like there to be. Eh, just an example. May not even be what you're looking for :P

So some of your references towards those mechanics aren't easy for me to understand in terms of complexity. I understand what it means for something to be infinite but having a game built around it of course changes the dynamic of playstyle, and from what I understand here, that's your intent with this mod. There are other mods out there that have infinite resource options such as bobs/angel and RSO by itself, but those are a very passive set of changes while your approach to infinite mining is an optional feature (building) with some downsides, and currently not truly infinite.

So, am I understanding this correctly here? :P

Mostly you've got it. It is meant to change the playstyle dynamic. But this is intentionally not infinite. I had an infinite version of the mod (well I still do), but basically I chose to blend systems. Rather than make it entirely like That Other Game, I'm basically thinking it's better to keep it somewhat Factorio-ish - in that you still have resource patches, and these patches can be depleted (but you can slow this with Mining Productivity research).

But on the flipside of that, the mod makes it a lot easier to pack up the equipment, move it, and set up a new outpost when that ore is gone. <-- And this is fixing what I really don't like about vanilla mining. And as a bonus, it has tradeoffs compared to conventional mining and is existing save compatible (the other project completely replaces the existing system so it isn't), and there is a price to be paid for the convenience.

There's a mod called https://mods.factorio.com/mod/warptorio2 , while I'd rather not explain the core concept of that mod because it's out of the scope of this discussion, it has a whole lot of researches regarding mining productivity efficiency.

Oh, I'm actually familiar with this mod! Anyways... Any way I can think of to limit it in way that wouldn't end up as "build more siphons" wouldn't be performance friendly, but maybe I'll think of other ideas in time.

But an an aside, mining productivity with the siphons works a bit like this. You don't get ore faster, and it's not even free in terms of pollution/power - The only thing it really does is slow down the depletion of ore on the ground.

There's a mod called https://mods.factorio.com/mod/vtk-deep-core-mining , in later versions he started adding things that you're probably not interested in, however, the core concept of this mod solves your mentioning of Factorio's mapgen/autoplace system (if I understand correctly what you meant by that).

This is another one I'm familiar with - and I like it. The problem with any sort of X% dice roll though, is RNG might be really generous or might be really stingy. That other mod version I've talked about - if you're not familiar with Satisfactory then the best way to think of it is it works similar to VTK's infinite patches. However, the version I created... it is more consistent than this/pure RNG dicerolls.

VTK's doesn't really solve that problem. Autoplace has such a system already built in - you can take a 'would-be' patch and have it make (for example) 10% rolls to determine if a given tile of ore appears or not. The trouble with converting to a resource system with a small number of powerful nodes spawn is small variations can be the difference between 'completely broken overpowered' and 'resource starved', and it makes scaling with the map setting sliders... very difficult.

TL;DR: it's a problem of consistency, and this is what I couldn't solve to my satisfaction in my other mining-overhaul mod project.

~

Anyways, the main reason I'm not content with VTK's just to play with... is it still leaves vanilla mining with a rather large role. The deep mining is something you grow into over time. Better than nothing, definitely, but I wanted a more fundamental change to the mechanics/interactions.

So, to recap, changing the mechanic/dynamic from the very early game is a specific goal of RS, but I'm also intentionally avoiding infinites, at least for now - to try to blend both games' dynamics. Maybe... think of it as trying to follow the spirit of one, but also trying to adapt it to better fit within Factorio's conventions - instead of a complete surgical replacement.

If I'm completely off the mark here regarding what you tried to convey to me, I blame my lack of knowledge regarding Satisfactory. :P Good luck!

Nope you're mostly pretty on. Hope this helps explain my thinking and where the mod might go.

Ah, if you decide like that "Spawn infinite patch when the patch disappears" is a good idea, you could have it like he has it so it cannot overlap, then you could also choose to have the infinite patch be very large in size and change the chance to be like 100%. That way you can make sure that throughput can't get to unintended levels:

1. You force an infinite patch to spawn.
2. Cannot overlap with other patches.
3. Make it a very large infinite patch.
4. 2&3 ensures only 1 infinite patch can spawn on an ore deposit unless that deposit is huge.

This way you can almost finetune how much throughput you'd like there to be. Eh, just an example. May not even be what you're looking for :P

Hmm...

A lot of what you're talking about is pretty much in that other mod project I keep referencing. I used collision boxes to ensure the nodes were properly spaced (similar to how oil patches work) and to exert what influence I could on ensuring a consistent ratio of infinite nodes.

The main difference, of course, is that they were there from the start, not something that spawned on depletion. But I'm not sure that kind of spawning could really save the project...

Alright thanks a lot for the informational posts. I'll stick with your mod as it is right now as it's interesting to experiment with it. Thank you for your time and input, the concept of resources has always been a fun one in Factorio. And it's always fun to see modders try a different approach to it every now and then!

Hey, just one last quick update. I've been looking over the API specs and I've worked out a way that I'm 99% sure I can tie range to a research done. So this will be my next project/update for RS.

In the meantime, please don't rely too much on the current range when you build - as it will be going down a lot!

Cheers.

I think this mod is nice, but more for later on, would be cool if you can do levels of this based on research.

I think this mod is nice, but more for later on, would be cool if you can do levels of this based on research.

Hi, this has been added via research yesterday. Thanks.