Hey folks, first time I'm actually battling my crippling anxiety and actually start engaging with the community of a game that I absolutely love.
I found this mod randomly a week or two ago and I've been absolutely in love with it. Despite being the most complex and unmedicated mod I've played yet, this wonderful spaghetti nightmare scratches all my itches for a Factorio mod.
So far, I have the first five sciences done (Red, Green, Military, Material, and Geological) and I'm almost done with blue science. I figured I should give my thoughts before I have to dive too deep into the fluids and chemisty added by the game before my opinion changes to "Yeah, it's fun till the fluids made me rip my hair out."
Also, three quick warnings. One, trigger warning, opinions ahead. I'd love to discuss with other people who have played the mod, but remember that I am a fake man on the internet who lives in your monitor, so take everything I say with a grain of salt, please. Second, I recognize that I am only 17 hours into a several hundred hour mod and I only have the first five out of like, what, 40+ sciences done? My opinions could drastically change once things get more complex (looking at you, fluids), but I've enjoyed the mod enough so far to give my thoughts now. And finally, I know that this mod is still in alpha and things are subject to change, so any criticisms I have should be taken lightly, as I trust that Spaghetti2364 will make the mod as they envision it and that could be way different than how I'd prefer it.
With that out of the way, here are my hodgepodge opinions.
THE THINGS I LIKED
1) This is such a minor thing, but I love looking at all the different ore patch colors on the map. It's very colorful and it activates the neurons in my little adhd lizard brain.
2) The "Everything on Nauvis" mod makes for some interesting map generation, even without alien biomes enabled. It was very cool to see a small volcanic region packed with all of the normal sights on Vulcanis (including the Demolisher territory!)
3) This is a big one for me, but this mod actually gives you a few mercies. The first one you're likely to notice is that all ore patches are incredibly rich, with even the starting patches having a couple million ores instead of a couple hundred thousand. I like this because it makes scouring for resources less of an immediate threat once I'm starting to really upscale production for blue science and beyond. This makes juggling the resources for the intermediates and throughput more of the focus on this mod in my opinion, which is what I love about this mod. The second big quality of life improvement is increased weapon damage. No joke, yellow ammo can chew through medium biters with only a couple of damage increase researches. I really appreciate this addition because since I'm taking so long to build and understand what's going on, the biters will naturally evolve more over time but the increased damage doesn't put nearly as much of a rush on you to build military before the biters get out of hand. There are a couple of other small things, like iron being at a 1:2 ore-to-plate ratio, or boilers consuming a tenth of the normal water, and they are all greatly appreciated.
4) For my starter base, I'm using a bus design, and properly setting one up feels incredibly rewarding. Once I had aluminum on the bus, making material science was as easy as pulling four things off the bus and putting them in assemblers with no extra fuss. The gargantuan amount of steps and intermediates can be managed pretty well if you think in advance.
THE THINGS I DISLIKED
1) This is such a minor nitpick, but the wind turbines are a bit jank. The crafting recipe and the factoriopedia entry don't tell you how much energy it produces (it's 200kW by the way) until you place one down. Also, they have a 0 watt electricity usage for some reason? Also clicking on them just gives you an empty menu. Again, such a minor thing, but I wanted to bring it up anyways as a potential fix in a later version.
2) This is the only thing that really made me groan in exhaustion, but sometimes map generation can really screw you over with earlygame ore patches. Iron, copper, stone, coal, tinstone, and nickel always generate close together, but the next two ores needed after those (aluminum and chromite) can generate basically anywhere with no guaranteed patch near everything else, at least in my experience of browsing map previews. The biggest offender was chromite, which was a pain to bring back to base because I didn't have the science needed to unlock trains yet (tl;dr I needed chromite to make pumpjacks and oil is needed for the science to unlock trains), so I just had to resort to a 1.5k long belt ride back to base. (https://imgur.com/a/spaghetorio-chromite-mine-eI6Qdkt) Amusing, yes, but also a bit annoying. Though I can mostly invalidate this complaint by just saying "map generation is weird and Videogames Are Hard (tm)"
3) That segues perfectly into my last criticism, and that's a good number of red/green science technologies being locked behind several more sciences. The biggest offender is trains, needing red/green/material/geological science, which makes bringing the aluminum, chromite, and oil needed back to base a bit of a pain. Additionally, fast inserters are locked behind blue science, the 5th (6th if you count military) science in the mod. It makes throughput more of a consideration but it usually isn't a fun problem to solve in my opinion.
And those are all of my major opinions about the mod! Thank you for reading all the way through it (or skimming through it if my wall of text was too much for your brain to process). Much love to the mod author and the people who made Spaghetorio a reality. Despite my nitpicks, I still love this mod and can't wait to play more of it.
Okay that's all, bye :)
