Schall Machine Scaling


Adds scaled up versions in different sizes for various machines. Number of overtiers can be freely adjusted. Designed for megabases and gigabases, by reducing total number of entities (thus reduced save file size, improved UPS). Includes assembling machine 3, chemical plant, electric furnace, oil refinery, centrifuge, lab, boiler, steam engine, steam turbine, heat exchanger, nuclear reactor, storage tank. (Locale: English, Deutsch, 正體中文, 简体中文, Português Brasileiro, Русский)

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2 years ago
0.16 - 1.1
9.90K
Manufacturing Power Storage

i [Responded] Scaled up mining drills (Will not implement)

4 years ago

It is possible to add overtier mining drills?

4 years ago
(updated 4 years ago)

Nope, sorry.
Do not think they will work as intended, according to reasons and calculations listed below.

I first answered this question somewhere else, which was:

Actually, it was the third machine (after assembling machine 3, electric furnace) to be considered adding when creating this mod. But then I realized these mining drills are not "permanent" machines, because ore patches are limited. They will stop mining and need to be removed quite soon. So seems not a useful machine to go overtier.

But I found that it is just a weak reason (out of SEVERAL stronger reasons) that electric mining drill (EMD) overtier do not work (too) well, when I revised EMD during creation of "Schall Recipe Scaling" mod:

  1. Game limitation on mining speed. For example, an original EMD has base speed 0.5/s; an EMD +5 is supposed to have 1024× speed (= 512/s). Not possible! Game limitation gives upper limit of 60/s, Even EMD +4 would work at half its rated speed. So not as useful to go overtier, compared to others.
  2. No recipes to be scaled, as "Schall Recipe Scaling". Mining does not work in the same way as other machines. There are no recipes to tune up the crafting time, in order to avoid the 60/s limit.
  3. Some may say mining output can be scaled up, like the pumpjack gives 10 oil per "mining" cycle instead of just 1 oil. However, it is actually NOT a property of pumpjack, but declared in the "resource"-"crude-oil" part. This means this will be applied to ALL miners/pumpjacks. So if I were to scale up mining time by 50× to 25/s, EMD +5 will work at full speed; but the starting burner mining drill will be forced to be using 50× mining time as well. I guess no one would like that.
  4. To megabase owners who concern about UPS, mining productivity bonus (purple bar) is the main contributor to output. Say, I have a tech level of mining productivity 20 (a "low" level to megabases), which gives mining productivity bonus of +200%. Take a mild overtier EMD +2 (16× = 8/s), the productivity bonus bar will gives 24/s. So the latter part contributes to 75% of total output. Sadly, the purple bar will also face the 60/s limit (see FAQ for explanation), which will be met at mining productivity 75! I saw many megabases have this tech level achieving to the hundreds, and even to the thousands range! An EMD +1 will easily meet this too at tech level 300 (not that hard really). So EMD overtiers become totally useless.

So the conclusion is that even EMD +2 would not be that useful to megabase owners. Even EMD +1 would work for a limited time only.
Be in mind that this mod is for megabase owners who start to have UPS concern. So I have much less concern for players who want to use them as jumpstarts or strip mining. Anyway, frequent re/deconstruction of mining drills is not fun to most players, I guess.

PS: Actually, I have introduced an advanced mining drill in my other mod: Schall Alien Tech. But I did the OPPOSITE thing: LOWER the base speed in this advanced mining drill. It has an intrinsic productivity bonus and an extra module slot, giving an actually higher overall output rate than vanilla EMD. The big advantages: ore deposits are consumed slower (so last longer, less frequent re/deconstruction), and prolonging the range of productivity bonus tech level that still gives effective returns.

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