Hello Schall!

I'm looking for modding behind the scenes stories of where modders used the Factorio game engine in unintended ways. You've created quite a number of popular mods, so I'm sure you have a few stories to tell :) Are you willing to share a story? We would love to hear from you and add it in a next release of Alt-F4 Modding Behind The Scenes.

Thanks for your invitation.
I love to read Alt-F4. It would be my honour to get a place in it, though I am a bit shy of exposing my inadequate grammar level.

I think I am a "well-behaved" modder (I guess?), not exploiting the game engine in unintended ways as often. So I am afraid my stories may not sound as interesting as others.
I can only think of the following cases of unorthodox uses of the game engine. Maybe you can have a preliminary judge first, whether which of below fit your theme better or not? And which one sounds the most interesting to you?

• Schall Geowarfare - Terrain destruction/alteration. Borrowing land mine prototypes to mimic the delayed trigger effect of their “Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri” originals.
• Schall Circuit Scaling - Sub-tile entities where their sizes are factions of a tile. Also introduced my own sub-tile grid for these mini entities to align with.
• Schall Pickup Tower - The towers are indeed compound entities. A "container" entity to store the collected items; and a "radar" entity for the scan timer, power consumption, and animation parts.
• Schall Endgame Evolution - Providing progressively larger sizes of alien units, pushing to the limits of game engine. (Indeed I had up to category XX beasts in earlier versions, but had broken the game pathfinding. Hence I had to lower the reduce the upper limit to category XV.) However, this mod is not hacking anything.
• Schall Gun Pod - Providing ammo-based defense equipment. The game engine does not provide such equipment type, so I have borrowed the electric-powered defense equipment type (like vanilla Personal Laser Defense equipment) with a bunch of supports (extra prototypes, recipes, shortcuts, scripts, etc) to mimic that.
• Schall Recharging Weapon - Somewhat opposite to Schall Gun Pod… The game engine does not provide (grid) electric-powered guns for the player characters to use. Thus some fake ammo will be generated on-fly via scripts, mimicking recharges from personal power grid.

I'm so glad you're willing to share a story with us! And don't worry about your grammar. It seems you're language is already quite good, and we have a good team to help catch any little errors that slip through :)

I think any of the last four will fit nicely, and I don't really have a strong preference. If I had to choose I would say the Schall Pickup Tower might be interesting, because it's easy to understand, and players might find it interesting that there's a radar underneath a chest, which actually really cool :) And the Endgame Evolution also sounds epic. I'll leave it up to you though.

If you want finished writing the paragraph or two you can paste it here, or send it to me on Discord (stringweasel 0691), I don't really mind which. And it would be great of you could add a short video clip of it in effect, but if that would take too much time I could always try to do that myself.

Sorry for the wait. I can only find out some time on weekend to finish writing up the story. That was about Schall Pickup Tower.
It was written in Markdown syntax and attached with a photo (assumed to be put after end of text). I have put them to my Google Drive. Please let me know after you have (or fail) downloaded them.

I noticed that my text maybe too long (others have approximately 300 words?). I have the bad habit of being too descriptive, very often putting too much details into text... Please also let me know, if you want to shorten it.

Also a note to your fellow translators. This mod is also available in several languages (Deutsch, 正體中文, 简体中文, Português Brasileiro, Русский), though they are located in Schall Language Pack instead. This may save them some headache from translating some terms.

Thanks Schall! No worries about the wait. Will probably be a while until I work it into a piece. But I'm very excited to have a story from you!