What does this mod add?

Four extra tiers on top of every solar panel, accumulator, battery equipment and fuel item that the game and your other mods provide. Nothing is replaced or rebalanced, the original items stay exactly as they were.

Each tier is about 31.6 times stronger than the one below it and costs 32 items of the previous tier.

Why 31.6 and not 32?

The factor is the square root of 1000, so every two tiers are exactly a factor of 1000. That keeps the numbers readable: a tier 2 solar panel is a thousand times a normal one, a tier 4 is a million times.

With vanilla values:

Is it cheaper to use higher tiers?

No, it is slightly more expensive. You pay 32 and you get 31.6, which is about 1.2 % loss per tier, or 4.9 % over all four tiers. You are not buying power, you are buying UPS.

So what is it for?

Entity count. One tier 4 solar panel does the work of a million normal ones. A megabase that runs at 20 UPS because of a few hundred thousand power entities runs at full speed with a handful of tier 4 panels and accumulators, for about 5 % more resources.

How do I unlock the new tiers?

The mod copies the technology that unlocked the original item and appends the tier number: if solar panels come from Solar energy, the new technologies are Solar energy 2 to Solar energy 5. Each one requires the previous, and the research cost is the same as the original technology.

If the original item is available from the start, the new tiers are available from the start too.

Can I use the upgrade planner?

Yes. Every tier points at the next one, and the whole chain shares a fast replaceable group, so the upgrade planner and Shift + build work between tiers.

Which prototypes get tiers, and which do not?

Tiers are created for:

• solar panels with a production value
• accumulators with a buffer capacity
• battery equipment with a non-zero buffer capacity
• items with a fuel value that are not placeable, and that either have a recipe or are mined from a resource or a tree

A prototype is skipped when it is hidden, when it has no item, when it has no recipe and cannot be mined, or when it is on the small blacklist of things that break when copied (currently the hand crank generator, the Bio Industries bio solar panel, the laser rifle charger and the helicopter remote).

Battery equipment gets one more rule: only the last tier in a chain is extended. If mk1 is an ingredient of mk2, the mod builds on mk2 and leaves mk1 alone, so you do not end up with two parallel ladders.

A mod of mine got no tiers, why?

Most often one of the reasons above. The mod writes a line into factorio-current.log for every prototype it skips and why, so search the log for Tiers32, error by, hidden, is not the last or no recipe by. Paste that line into a discussion thread and I will have a look.

The new items show as "Unknown key: item-name...."

The display names are hand written per supported mod, so anything that is not on the list has no name yet. Tell me the mod and the item in a discussion thread and it gets added. The items work normally in the meantime.

Does it work with Space Age?

Yes. Everything that Space Age adds and that matches the rules above gets tiers, including its fuels.

Which version do I need?

• Factorio 2.1 -> mod version 2.1.x
• Factorio 2.0 -> mod version 2.0.x

Both builds contain the same code. The 1.2.x releases are for Factorio 1.1 and are no longer maintained.

Can I remove the mod from an existing save?

Only after you have removed every entity and item the mod added, the same as for any mod that adds prototypes. Fuel already sitting in a furnace or a locomotive counts too.

Can I change the factor or the number of tiers?

Not from the settings menu at the moment. The values are tiers_amount and k_main at the top of solar-panels.lua, accumulators.lua, battery-equipment.lua and fuel.lua. If enough people want them as startup settings, open a discussion thread.