I love the thought process in this mod, and I think it takes great lessons from the Fulgora design philosophy.

This idea/thought applies to the Adaptation recipes (e.g. voidtronic adaptation). The balance on these recipes doesn't do enough to encourage the voidtronic use over the original recipe. We add the complexity of dealing with byproducts, but the power and space footprint of not dealing with intermediaries in the traditional recipes are often lost. Much in the way that the Fulgora scrap recipes provide more output value, I think the adaptation recipes should be providing more.

Examples with no input and half a red circuit output:
A) Voidtronics = 4.7 Assembly 2 (adv. circuit), 7 Voidforge (voidtronic), 7 Voidforge (void flux), 7 Voidforge (void fuel)
[obviously the distribution of power sources and void buildings can be moved about, but with little change in total footprint]
B) Traditional = 6 Assembly 2, .5 Chem (plastic), 1 Oil Refinery, and about 14 Voidforges + 5 Steel Furnaces for the basic items.

Note that A does not account for dealing with the random outputs while B has the benefit of using the basic items like iron or petroleum for other outputs if circuits are idle.

Considering that you want people to play with your new mechanics, ideally more frequently than they would choose to just play the game "normal", I think you've got a few ways to solve this. Either make the void adaptation aggressively more valuable/interesting AND/OR remove some traditional recipes to force the use of the void (e.g. get rid of the green circuit, red circuit, and engine recipes).

Some of this also philosophy applies to the evaluation of using voidworks over voidforges. The footprint for power generation is greater than just using voidforges with adjacent voidfuel generators. I think perhaps the focus has been too much on "balance" instead of tech "improvement". New things should be better.

I was contemplating posting similar feedback. You eloquently describe the same issue I am running into, so I will add my agreement and piggy back a few more comments. I have run various designs through Factory Planner, and the energy cost for using higher tech void recipes is so huge that I have no motivation to void-create anything other than the basic resources (ore, coal, water, stone, etc) and otherwise simply use standard recipes / buildings for mall and all sciences. I say this even after going to the trouble to create 2x2 nuclear reactor grid for 480MW sustainable power generation. Maybe I am missing something, but the primary benefits of the higher-tech void recipes seem to be convenience (e.g. fewer waste byproducts) and smaller footprint - but the tradeoff is huge waste of energy. This is compounded by all the electric forges getting worse efficiency (speed per kw power) the higher tech you go, and the only modules available to the forges (speed runes) make the problem even worse and I can never see the use case for adding speed rune to a forge instead of just building more forges (since they can’t be impacted by beacons or modules). As with OP - I feel like I have to force myself to use the void recipes, I am not seeing the benefit of the tech at all and now I am playing Vanilla Factorio except I get my ores from an infinite source instead of a mine.

I hope this comes across as constructive criticism, I do love the idea behind the mod and want to see it get better.

Thank you for your kind words and your constructive, well-articulated thoughts.

The tradeoff with voidcrafting is the convenience and smaller footprint and the ability to get exactly what you want exactly where you want it, vs. the increased power demands and the randomized byproducts if you don't want to deal with piping in coherence infusion. If voidcraft becomes too easy, then you're just conjuring whatever you want whenever you want and this mod just feels like creative mode with extra steps. On the other hand, if voidcraft is strictly worse, then there's no point to using it and you might as well just play regular Factorio.

When designing the mod, I admit I wanted to err on the side of not making voidcraft good enough, because I think all of us here like playing Factorio (obviously) and I didn't want to make it feel pointless to still have to build a factory. So, in that sense, I think I succeeded, but arguably I might have succeeded too well if the voidcraft recipes are simply not enticing most of the time.

I will have to get more feedback and think about this a bit more, but this has been valuable when I consider what sort of tweaks I'll want to work into the next version. Thank you again for your insights.

I completely agree with your concern about the tradeoff...if voidcraft did produce only the thing you wanted. Since it produces many other items, I think you can push it further. I think you could probably create more interesting junk-byproduct problems maybe...not just quantity, but new issues to handles those outputs. I think you're right that it's strictly balanced, but because everyone is already familiar with factorio, the easier route is to make the thing you already know how to make... So then all you're voidcrafting are the basic ores.

Good luck with the balancing though!

Thank you. I've released a version 1.3.0 which begins to address some of these issues. So far, I've only changed a few items where I felt like I messed it up according to my own internal logic, without really tackling whether that internal logic is good or not... but that's the next step. I did give military items a buff, though, because I thought conveniently producing ammo was an excellent use of voidcraft and I wanted to encourage that.

I've revisited speed runes after playing and testing more and noticing that I rarely used them in my own games as well. Due to voidcraft being a somewhat different mechanic, and the lack of any sort of variety to the runes, balancing them like speed modules probably didn't work as well as I hoped. As of version 1.3.4, I have reduced their power demand so that the speed increase and power increase are now equal: boosting the speed of a voidworks by 50% also only boosts its power consumption by 50%, which should hopefully make runes much more appealing.