I needed better nukes to deal with a biter situation but True Nukes wasn't ready for 2.0 yet so I made my own nukes mod - which is why I called it "Stopgap Nukes".

Are you bummed out because you can't proliferate nuclear weapons in Space Age because True Nukes isn't updated yet? Well here's a mod that's almost as good! It is simpler than True Nukes, the explosion effects are not near as good but it's still functional enough to get the job done for situations where the vanilla nuke just doesn't cut it. True Nukes is now updated for Factorio 2.0. I'm still going to develop this one because I prefer it (biased, I know).

Much of the lua code that handles the explosions is similar to that of True Nukes. The 20 ton and 15kt warheads perform mostly the same but the 1kt nuke can cause a bit more post-explosion lag in certain situations because it causess more biters to get involved because the damage dropoff by distance is tuned differently.

Included nuclear weapons

• Vanilla atomic bomb (1 ton equivalent yield)
• 20 ton atomic bomb
• 120 ton atomic bomb
• 1 kiloton atomic bomb
• 15kt atomic bomb
• 500kt atomic bomb
• 2 megaton thermonuclear bomb
• 100 megaton fusion bomb (still wip, with 2mt placeholder explosion)
• nuclear warhead tipped bullets

Included non-nuclear weapons

• Fuel air bomb. Catches air on fire and causes a very large conventional explosion. Comes in cannon shell, artillery shell and rocket variants. Can be unlocked earlier than atomic bombs.
• acid bomb. Bomb the biters with acid. Comes in rocket and artillery shell variants.
• poison bomb. Like the poison capsule except actually worthwhile. Comes in rocket and cannon shell variants.
• dirty bomb. Instead of using uranium to make a nuclear explosion, pollute the surrounding area and kill everything organic. Comes in rocket and artillery shell variants.

It is highly recommended that you use the Aircraft mod and/or the Ballistic missile mod. Anything more powerful than the vanilla atomic bomb is hard to use with just a handheld rocket launcher.

Join the discord to talk about bugs and make suggestions: https://discord.gg/2UbdS4unc4

Note that using the discord server is the best and fastest possible way to contact me. If any game-breaking issues with the mod come up, I would greatly appreciate being notified as I don't check mods.factorio.com that often.

If you enjoy this mod please consider buying me a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/windowsxp51972

This is still a work in progress so please report bugs in the discussion forum or on discord.

I have the mod on github to make it easier for people to suggest changes: https://github.com/Xeraster/StopgapNukes

Lag avoidance tips

In most situations, the biggest cause of lag isn't actually the explosion, its the biters reacting to the explosion. When you detonate a very large atomic bomb, biters will come from miles to rush ground zero. Depending on how many spawners were effected, this can mean thousands or even tens of thousands of biters are congregating in the blast zone, eating away TPS. This is a much bigger problem on deathworld, enemy race manager and rampant than it is on normal biter settings. If your game is still lagging a lot 2 minutes after detonating a 1kt atomic bomb or higher, you can use the ctrl+alt+e debug menu to delete all of the excess biters which instantly deletes the lag. I recently added nuclear fallout which kills biters that travel to the blast location for up to 90 seconds after the explosion which helps a little bit.

tl;dr: carpet bombing the entire map with nukes instead of taking it easy usually means less lag because more biters will be dead.

Amount of lag to expect by warhead (6th gen i7 cpu, large modlist)

• 20 ton nuke negligible. Same performance as the True Nukes 20 ton nuke.
• 120 ton nuke negligible, can cause biter swarm lag with high enemy population
• 1kt nuke 1:15 for explosion, causes extreme biter swarm lag with high enemy population. Doesn't cause too much lag on normal biter settings. About the same explosion time as in True Nukes but with 2x worse post-explosion biter lag for some reason
• 15kt nuke 2:19 for explosion, causes less post-explosion biter swarm lag than the 1kt nuke because it kills so many of them. Can take up to 4 minutes for all of the affected biters to actually die and for things to return to 60tps. Same performance as True Nukes 15kt warhead.
• 500kt nuke 5:30 for the explosion to finish, 17:30 minutes to finish modifying all affected chunks. No biter swarm lag because it kills them all.
• 2mt nuke One time I did one of these and came back after 45 minutes and my game wasn't lagging anymore
• 100mt nuke just dont

Bug Fix Wishlist

• the 500kt, 2mt and 100mt explosions lag a lot.
• the recipes for most stopgap nukes added items don't show up in their respective tooltip description item menu in map mode (but it works in non-map mode.) all items can still be crafted normally and this is not a gameplay-breaking bug.
• compatibility with KS Combat Revival isn't going to happen unless someone with better Factorio modding skills than me figures it out