I've really been enjoying the mod and I'm nearing the two T4 tech cards. I love the way that it encourages the use of circuits to properly automate the factory and the encouragement to automate overall instead of runnning around with the cube in pocket. The spider-web design I've got to make sure the cube is almost always being processed just makes my brain very happy. It also doesn't seem to want to make the game complex for complexity's sake, and I truely appreciate that.

My question is when it comes to the T3 recipes (Altered matter unit, and Altered components) what benefits do they have over the previous tier of production? I understand that the phantom cube is required for new materials, but the phantom cube recipes for existing materials seem to be a tenth of the production for a massively increased input and energy costs. Even when running the calculations with beacons, it doesn't seem to be any better, and it feels like it should.

I suppose I could drop more machines to process in parallel with all the phantom cubes, but then the resource and power costs skyrocket again.

You have 64 phantom cubes so even with a recipe that's only 0.1x the speed, you can theoretically get stuff 6.4x faster.

I suppose I could drop more machines to process in parallel with all the phantom cubes, but then the resource and power costs skyrocket again.

Extra power draw for better cube-time, the most important resource.

Personally I used altered matter, but I did not use altered components since that requires some balancing that my base wasn't ready for.