The latest version of Loader Redux (1.4.4) causes your mod to crash on load now with the following error:

Error while running setup for entity prototype "wsf-factory-loader" (loader): fast_replaceable_group must be set when next_upgrade is set.

I wasn't able to replicate your bug with just Factorio 0.17.9, Loader Redux 1.4.4, and WSF 0.1.12. BUT, I think the error message was enough for me to identify and fix the issue. I can't be sure this fix will work since I wasn't able to replicate the crash, but try upgrading to WSF 0.1.13 which should fix the error for you. Thank you for the bug report!

Yeah i have about 30+ mods in my current map so its probably a wierd combination thing, but it all seems to work perfectly again now, thanks. I'm hoping your gonna add more WSF buildings (maybe a giant solar plant or something) because this mod really adds purpose to the exploring of the map which i feel was lacking in the base game

The problem is that when I add new buildings, unless they pop up constantly, people complain about not being able to find them.

When I made the giant oil refinery, I wanted it to be a fun discovery. I purposely left pictures out of my mod portal. I wanted a sense of discovery and amazement at how big it was. And originally I had it appear pretty rarely, mainly because I had it spawn perfectly in ratio of need for Assemblers to Furnaces to Oil Refineries needed to produce 10k science per minute. I had it spawn what I thought was a perfectly balanced amount of the time based on need, but I got a TON of complaints of people having trouble finding it and complaining how much they needed to explore. That was one of the parts of the oil refinery I was excited about.

I ended up doubling its spawn rate, but halving its crafting speed so it'd still be appropriately ratioed with the other buildings, and still people thought it wasn't spawning enough, but I didn't want to increase its spawn rate anymore.

I've had requests for labs, separate chemical plants, centrifuges, etc, but those all run into the same issue as the oil refinery except even worse and more rare.

I've also had request for buildings with set recipes, which I've been told is similar openTTD, but the problem is that just in the base game alone there are 200+ recipes... if you were looking for one particular recipe, you'd need to spawn a lot. Even if I were to programatically limit it to recipes that lead up to science packs, it is still way too many. I haven't played openTTD, so I don't know how they manage it, but I'd assume they just have way fewer recipes.

In 0.17 they introduced a new feature called recipe_lock, which would make setting recipes to an unchangeable recipe easier, but I haven't come up with a good system of balancing that.

Yeah it seems like 90% of people who use mods these days are just looking for ways to make things quicker and easier rather than actual balance which is kinda sad.

When i started my new map for 0.17 I explored a 1000x1000 tile area before planning my infrastructure and i found 4 Oil Refineries in that area which seems plenty to me when you consider that they can all be beaconed to pretty incredible speeds

I think set recipes is a terrible idea, especially given that a fully modded game like mine would probably have nearer to 500 different recipes so finding the ones you really want/need would be a total chore. The current system for furnaces/assemblers seems to work pretty well to me, I have sufficient availabilty for smelting all the metals/alloys required by full Bob's in WSF furnaces without having to really expand too far and i just use WSF factories for things with high throughput need (circuit boards, iron gearwheels etc), plus its nice to be able to assign factories to things so they are at least vaguely near something else in the production chain. If people want openTTD they should just go play that, not try and make Factorio into it because its far too complex to do that anyways

However i do think it would be nice to have a couple of rare useful buildings (lab complex, power plant, marketplace/trading post) just to make exploration and planning more important and fun, if people want to make the game easier they should just install one of the ten thousand "easier recipes/free stuff" mods that are prolific these days.

I really hope you will continue to expand the mod though as WSF was one of the mods that really rekindled my interest in Factorio at the end of last year (I had over 600 hours played having played since 0.12 and done every achievement, built huge 10k SPM bases and stuff) but WSF and LTN gave me a whole new way of designing and running things rather than the same old giant main bus style bases that i found rather dull.

Just to add I think one thing the mod could benefit from is some more refinement in the spawning algorithm, I don't know if its just my bad luck but i seem to have large areas (200x200 tiles) with no spawns and then the 200x200 grid next to it will have 2 furnaces and 2-3 assemblers in it which gives the map a clustered feel, but it might just be an artifact of RNG.

It might be useful to use a region style spawning system, that's how RSO (and now vanilla) work to spawn ores. I.E. (I'll use RSO's default values here for example) a region is 7x7 chunks (a chunk is 32x32 tiles of course), and eitther a single resource or a set 'group' of resources spawn within it.

This could be done by WSF by having, say, a region of 16x16 or 20x20 or whatever, and the script pre-sets everything that should spawn within the given region, for example say 8 assemblers, 1 oil, 1 lab, etc... and it randomly assigns coordinates within that region. From that point on whenever a chunk is generated within that predefined region it just checks if it need to spawn the appropriate thing in that given chunk. Any time a new chunk is generated in a new region then that region prepopulates with coordinates for each type of thing as well.