Love the mod so far. It got me thinking. What if we could fire other fluids at the biters? Oil, modded fluids, sulfuric acid, Angel's molten metals, and so on. Would that be out of scope for this mod?

The water turret is available very early (after researching "Turrets") and quite cheap to make. I think it would be overpowered to let it use any other fluids than water and steam. These are available right from the start. Sure, you can use hotter steam which will need a more advanced technology to make, but in the end, it's still only heated water, so I've no problem with that.

In addition, everything is hard-coded to just water and steam. Allowing new fluids could be quite hard to implement, and I'd rather not get to work on that. Sorry! :-)

Quite alright. Follow up. I'm trying to learn to mod. Do I have your permission if I wanted to make a companion mod to expand the fluids used?

Quite alright. Follow up. I'm trying to learn to mod.

Watch out! Once you start with that, you may have no time left for playing anymore! :-D

Do I have your permission if I wanted to make a companion mod to expand the fluids used?

If you can do it, why not? Currently, I'm creating 2 turret prototypes: one that accepts water and one that accepts steam (if I remember correctly, that was necessary for the stream they shoot). Only the water turret has a recipe and can be built, but if that's connected to steam, it will be replaced with the steam turret. You probably should change the steam turret because the main purpose of the water turret is to put out fires (even if it doesn't work quite right yet), so feeding them oil may not be the best idea. :-)

... That sounds like one of those "is it a bug? Or a feature?" moments. Tossing oil on a fire to boost it. But yes, thank you for the support and suggestion. I'm already doing more troubleshooting than playing just helping report mod conflicts. Running 200+ mods is one heck of a thing.

... That sounds like one of those "is it a bug? Or a feature?" moments. Tossing oil on a fire to boost it.

It's getting even weirder: I use dummies to mark a fire; if a dummy is killed, the fire will be extinguished (it can also burn off of its own). But the dummies are only vulnerable to water damage (dealt only by the water turrets, not steam turrets) and completely resistant against any other damage.
Damage can also be negative; in that case, affected entities will be healed (that's what happens in vanilla if you're eating fish: you take negative damage and thus regenerate). But as the dummies only react to water damage, shooting them with oil wouldn't even boost the fire. So, you wouldn't have to apply fire damage to oil and other burnable fluids to get that effect, but a negative amount of water damage -- at least if you aim for compatibility with this mod.

But yes, thank you for the support and suggestion.

You're welcome!

I'm already doing more troubleshooting than playing just helping report mod conflicts. Running 200+ mods is one heck of a thing.

And I thought I'd have a lot of mods in my game! A quick grep through mod-list.json brought up 141 enabled mods …

Not quite what you wanted, I'm afraid, but similar: I had the idea to add another turret that would only fight fire but use (other mods') fire-extinguisher fluids. Could be unlocked by oil processing or a later tech, and perhaps shoot farther (although that would mean scanning a larger area, which is bad for UPS). I'll think about it …