Verbose Engineering
Have you ever wondered why everything in the game used normal crafting recipes?
Now introducing the overhaul where everything is crafted as its spelled.
Decompile base resources down to their leter components and rebuild everything from letter components.
Spoiling
If you have the space age DLC and use a mod that enables spoiling (e.g. enable-all-feature-flags),
then letters will by default spoil. The time to spoil decreases for the rarer letters.
Both spoiling as a whole and a flat spoil time scalar can be set in the mod settings.
Using letter spoiling is the recommended (masochistic) way to play, but it's not required.
Fish??
The only way to get a G for the first steam engine would be through spoilage.
As such, the default fish spoil time has been reduced to prevent excessive waiting.
If the spoiling flag is not enabled, you can "smelt" fish in furnaces to get spoilage instead.
Tips
- Make sure you have lots of trees.
- Fish do not respawn. Use them wisely.
- You can melee biters and nests. Press the shoot key when you have no weapon equipped.
- Some letters can be very rarely obtained by decompiling other letters before you have a better supply.
- Fluid barrels can be decompiled to convert fluids into letters.
- The circuit network is your friend.
Compatibility
This mod is not compatible with space age or any major overhauls.
It's frankly a miracle that everything works so well with only minimal tweaks, but
the balance is fragile and any new resources could easily annihilate all sense of progression.
Use other mods at your own discretion.
For modders
For a recipe to become letter-ified, two things must be true:
1. The recipe category must have use_letter_recipes = true in its prototype
2. The recipe must not have disable_letter_recipe = true in its prototype
By default, a letter-ified recipe has all output amounts set to 1 for items and 50 for fluids, and not allow productivity.
Have dont_change_letter_results = true in its prototype to override this behaviour
(Warning! This will probably allow net-positive crafting cycles in most scenarios)
If you wish to prevent an item from being letter decompiled, have disable_letter_decompiling = true in its prototype.
Contributing
I'd love it if someone could play through and give suggestions for balance.
I've only had the time to playtest everything myself up until into early-green science,
but the overhaul is fully thought-out and theoretically playable all the way to white science.