So, the Mod works just fine, but there are things that could be improved to make using it less stressful and tedious.

My main problem with the Mod, is the UV Lamps. There basically completely worthless, and the amount of drain they cause on your electrical network is really bad when they don't really do anything to reflect that cost. For example, in order to keep one of my Drilling/Furnace sites properly protected, I have to use about 10+ UV Lamps. The lamps are 160 kw each, so this quickly totals to about 2 MW of power, just spent on keeping the lamps active. This wouldn't be so bad, and would offer a risk/reward styled play, except that the lamps have a tiny range, effectively negating any benefit worth this amount of power.

As far as I can tell, they only repel Wisps within maybe 1 or 2 tiles of where their placed? Because of this, placing them behind walls doesn't seem to do much, as the Wisps still float through my walls, not only damaging them, but flooding me with 50 Alerts about it, which distracts me from actual noteworthy Alerts. If I put the UV Lamps in front of my walls, this helps a lot more, but then I have to place significantly more electrical poles, and in the end, without the walls to protect the UV Lamps, they end up getting destroyed by Biters.

On paper, this doesn't sound so bad. But this is just to protect ONE facility, this doesn't include outgoing/incoming parts from said facility. The Wisps LOVE to attack belt lines, which are generally strewn from outside one facility to another one, unless your using trains, although that's mostly reserved for larger hauls (I should probably use trains more often). As a result, I've tried placing UV Lamps along my solitary belt lines, but even using just a handful of them easily eats up another 5 MW of power, and worse yet, they still don't protect my belt lines, due to the short Wisp-repel radius.

This makes it very difficult to enjoy the Mod. I understand that I shouldn't be able to ward off the Wisps easily, but them just existing in the wilderness and their structural damage potential is dangerous enough, especially since you have to wait quite a while before you can research the UV Lamps, only for them to be disappointing.

If possible, I'd like to see the power cost of the UV Lamps cut in half, and their Wisp-repelling radius extended to like 5 tiles or so. I feel like that's a reasonable effect, considering it's only purpose is to keep Wisps away from your base, given that it doesn't really do that right now for the resources it consumes.

Their range of UV lamps is 12 tiles, but they don't have an instant effect.
Effect on yellow/green/red wisps should apply every ~2s.
Effect on purple ones is probabilistic, and should look like this - https://e.var.nz/uv-lamp-spore-kill-chart.html - where Y axis is survival chance, and X is number of times that effect is applied (same interval).
If they don't work like that, might be a bug somewhere, though they do in my game, not sure how to reproduce it.

You can turn off damage from purple and/or non-purple ones in Mod Options separately, so that maybe you don't need these lamps at all.
One option to address the power drain might be to use wisp detector combinators to only turn the lamps on when there is a need for them.
It's also possible to remove the trees around the facility.
Power usage is high on purpose, to prevent from just placing these things everywhere and incentivize making a smart perimeter with detectors instead, but idk how to balance it better or make a nicer mechanic out of these.

If you don't want to disable the damage, but want lower drain on these, I'd suggest unpacking directory from a mod zip file (in "factorio/mods" dir), opening prototypes/uv-lamp.lua in any text editor (e.g. notepad, notepad++, etc) and changing energy_usage_per_tick = '160kW', line there to something lower.
You can also tweak effect range of these lamps via conf.uv_lamp_range = 12 line in the config.lua file there.

flooding me with 50 Alerts about it, which distracts me from actual noteworthy Alerts

Yeah, these are kinda annoying with purple wisps, as they tend to always cause some minor damage to walls and turrets here and there.
Again, just disabling damage from them can fix that, if too annoying.

But honestly I think vanilla alerts are just not very useful - they don't produce sound, don't distinguish between biters harmlessly chewing walls or rampaging in the middle of your base, and don't react on biter hordes approaching, which is kinda why I made biter detector mod and put up detectors+speakers in various outposts and large base parts, with unique and annotated global signals, while mostly ignoring all vanilla damage alerts.

The Wisps LOVE to attack belt lines, which are generally strewn from outside one facility to another one, unless your using trains, although that's mostly reserved for larger hauls (I should probably use trains more often).

Hm, yeah, this might actually be a problem with these things.
I play on rail worlds and pretty much never have belts without a ton of surrouning buildings and use trains for that (e.g. current K2 game), so it's not an issue for me, but guess it'd be annoying if you connect bases by belts.
Should probably just make these things immune to wisp damage, same as rails, thanks for the idea.

I never really noticed the lamps repelling the other wisps, but I don't watch my bases 24/7, so I suppose it's mainly the purple ones doing all the damage. I could turn off structure damage, but then they would serve much purpose. I guess I'll just accept them as an "alien nuisance" until I can get access to construction robots and put them in all my bases.

I didn't really think about editing things myself. I'm used to dealing with .jsons and similar files, not LUA. In a lot of other games, you have to unpack the archives and place them in the mod folder, so I never thought about unpacking them and repacking them after editing. Sounds simple enough, I'll give that edit a try.

never thought about unpacking them and repacking them after editing

Don't really need to do it here either - just unpack the dir and (optionally) delete the zip, factorio is fine with either dir or an archive.
I think it even offers to update unpacked mod dirs, but not sure if it might replace them with downloaded .zip or unpack the new one there.

I never really noticed the lamps repelling the other wisps, but I don't watch my bases 24/7, so I suppose it's mainly the purple ones doing all the damage.

Yeah, if you meant purple ones, they just don't die or flee from lamps immediately, but have more limited and probabilistic life expectancy, as mentioned, so always have a chance to live long enough to slightly damage something.
One unorthodox fix to prevent that as much as possible can be putting like 10 lamps in one place (ideally switched on by detector, for power efficiency), which would 10x the kill chances, but idk, aside from minor damage to a couple specific types of buildings, they're mostly harmless.

guess I'll just accept them as an "alien nuisance"

That's pretty much the idea - shiny alien fauna which is mostly there for the atmosphere and only a bit of a nuisance.

Might want to get lamps against other types if you happen to set large forests on fire (esp. with "long nights" mods like clockwork around) or bump into red ones, but unlike biters, if these things make trouble, all you need to do is wait until morning at most.

Yeah, I don't quite fully understand the combinator/connector wiring system for Factorio, so maybe I should do that after looking up a tutorial.

I don't really set forests on fire, the wisps just kind of "exist". I don't know if their left overs from the previous night that lay dormant during the day and come back out, or maybe my turrets are destroying stuff while defending against the Biters, but sometimes they pop out and swarm a place. I'm probably just not paying attention to any minor landscaping I might be doing while putting down belts, or something.

Oh yeah, one thing to mention, is this mod can be a bit of a nightmare with "Water Turrets" installed. Maybe I should mention it on their board, but basically, the water turrents slow things down, but I think the game technically registers them as dealing "zero" damage, which is enough to trigger the affect of the red wisps. My game never runs slow, even with 100+ Mods installed, but if the Water Turret hits a Red Wisp, BAM: hundreds of them instantly, almost freezes my game. A few grenades takes care of that quick, though. It's only happened once so far, but it was a scary thing, watching them explode outward like a nuke.

Oh yeah, one thing to mention, is this mod can be a bit of a nightmare with "Water Turrets" installed. Maybe I should mention it on their board, but basically, the water turrents slow things down, but I think the game technically registers them as dealing "zero" damage, which is enough to trigger the affect of the red wisps.

@mkfg: The best solution to that would be if you ignored the damage types from my turrets:

"WT-steam", "WT-water",  "WT-extinguisher-fluid"

Of course, I could and should add the wisps to the list of entities that will never be actively attacked. But the problem is, if the turrets attack a biter and a wisp is moving next to it at the moment of impact, it will get some of the area damage. Also, making wisps invulnerable to my damage types doesn't really help because -- as Augoeides noticed -- zero damage still counts as damage (which is good because it allows us to detect when something has been attacked).

@Pi-C: You came out of nowhere, haha. Yeah, I've modded enough games to know there's always a caveat like zero damage being a technicality.

Water Turrets is pretty good, btw. I haven't messed around with Steam or the Extinguisher yet, but fun so far, especially since I have Biter Expansion enabled, so the water streams do a good job of keeping me sane when I get swarmed.

@Pi-C: You came out of nowhere, haha.

No miracle, I'm just still subscribed to new messages here because I've had a temporary replacement mod for Will-o'-the-Wisps. :-)

Water Turrets is pretty good, btw. I haven't messed around with Steam or the Extinguisher yet, but fun so far, especially since I have Biter Expansion enabled, so the water streams do a good job of keeping me sane when I get swarmed.

Glad you like it! But you really should try steam, it's available early on (if you have enough fuel to burn and a water supply) and much more efficient against biters. Just put a boiler near the turrets (or put some turrets around your steam-engine area!) and give the hordes a warm welcome. :-) Also, it shouldn't be too hard to set up alternating water and steam turrets, so that you still can extinguish fires.

I kinda like the idea of exploding number of wisps tbh - it's how reds are intended to work, and player is supposed to know it.
Shame about performance though, guess now there's a limit on their replication added from an earlier thread on the issue, at least game doesn't crash or hang outright, but I should probably test what happens with water turrets specifically and add some rate-limiting in there too, so that it works better.

In-game fix for the replication thing would be to add detector and disable water turrets when red wisps are around, or something like that.
Not entirely sure if fluid can be pumped out of turrets though - if not, that might be a problem.

Again, don't think it's a bug that you get a surprise army of these, outside of performance, as that's exactly what weird mechanic is there for, and it can be disabled by setting replication factor or red spawn chances to 0.
Adding an option to control replication rate-limiting should probably fix the issue if you just don't want to deal with replication under those specific conditions or put a limit on difficulty of dealing with reds in general, and I think is better than one specific damage type exception, as I bet there are plenty of other mods that can cause similar problem.

In-game fix for the replication thing would be to add detector and disable water turrets when red wisps are around, or something like that.
Not entirely sure if fluid can be pumped out of turrets though - if not, that might be a problem.

Voiding the turret's fluidbox is possible. However, when should I void it? Usually, we want to have a buffer so the turrets can continue to shoot even if some pipes have been destroyed. Unfortunately, I don't see how turrets could be hooked up to the circuit network directly. I guess I could add a connector box as separate entity, read circuit network signals from there, and set "turret.active = false" if I get a "Turn off" signal. But that would require some work (beginning with making and placing the graphics for the connector boxes for each direction to actually dealing with the circuit network in Lua).

Also, it's difficult to implement this within the game's logic. The common water turrets are available as soon as the "turrets" tech has been researched. This is a very early technology, you already may have produced some green circuits at this point, and set up a steam engine or two for electricity -- but you don't know anything about advanced electronics and making circuitry yet. How could I explain that the turrets come with a logic unit that early? Locking the normal water turrets behind "Circuit network" would also be bad because it comes so late. The general idea behind the water turrets is that they are a very simple way to slow down approaching enemies so the other turrets have more time to kill them, so they should be unlocked as early as possible.

I would be different for the advanced fire extinguisher turrets, though. They are unlocked with "Lubricant", so there's nothing wrong with adding circuitry to them. But would you really want to turn these off? Fire kills trees. Killed trees will spawn wisps. We must kill fire to keep the number of wisps low. But killing fire may harm wisps and trigger their replication…

How could I explain that the turrets come with a logic unit that early?

Another tech requiring "Circuit network" could do the trick. It would require only red and green science (like "Circuit network"), but insane amounts of it. "Circuit network" needs just 100 units of each science pack, the highest number required by any red+green tech is 250. So I could make it require something like 500 and magically auto-update all existing turrets when this new tech has been researched.

Voiding the turret's fluidbox is possible. However, when should I void it?

Yeah, didn't mean to suggest doing that (assuming that pumps indeed don't empty turrets), just that proposed simple fix probably wouldn't be a solution :)

I've now added green, red, and yellow wisps to the ignore_target_mask of my turrets and given them 100% resistance against their damages. This also applies to the wisps from "The Night Has A Thousand Eyes".

Oh well, probably won't bother with rate limiting fix then, until someone brings up same issue elsewhere :)

Well, the wisps will still trigger on_entity_damaged if they get zero-damage. Correct me if I'm wrong: Red wisps are triggered when on_entity_damaged is executed, so they wouldn't replicate if that function was never called?

In this case, just update line 808 of control.lua to this:

local on_red_wisp_damaged_filter = {
  {filter='name', name='wisp-red'},
  {filter = 'final-damage-amount', comparison = "≠", value = 0, mode = "and"}
}

(Not sure if the comparison operator really makes sense, perhaps ">" would be better.)

But I want them to replicate on damage effects from water turrets, that's what they are meant to do, make things interesting and not be just another conventional enemy, though already wrote it above in more detail.
Also, if these turrets no longer target any wisps (not sure if a good thing, but oh well), guess replication should only happen from a random area effect, which is probably rare enough to not be a performance issue anyway.

But I want them to replicate on damage effects from water turrets, that's what they are meant to do, make things interesting and not be just another conventional enemy, though already wrote it above in more detail.

Ah, didn't notice that.

Also, if these turrets no longer target any wisps (not sure if a good thing, but oh well),

From my point of view it makes sense. In German, we have the proverb "to shoot sparrows with a cannon" (similar to "cracking nuts with a sledgehammer" in English, but the metaphorical cannon is more fitting in this case.) The turrets aren't meant to waste time and ammo on innocent wisps, but on fierce biters. They couldn't kill the wisps anyway, base damage is 0.005 (there are multipliers for steam and pressure etc.), which is sufficient to kill my dummies (2HP) after a while -- but the turrets would be locked on the wisps for the better part of an eternity instead of slowing down the hordes.

Adding wisps to my ignore_target_masks is somewhat important to my mod. If you want to, I can take back the immunity, so they can still take splash damage. I haven't uploaded yet, so that wouldn't be a big deal …

It's probably best to defer to your and Augoeides' opinions on the matter, as you guys play with the combination of both mods and probably know best how they should interact.

From my limited perspective:

• I think making exceptional cases is counter-intuitive and a bad practice in general.

  Not to be avoided at all costs ofc, but just not ideal, as you have to make a rulebook for these and keep them all in mind, or otherwise plop down a turret and - surprise - it doesn't work as you expect it to on this one enemy!

  Factorio and similar games are actually best examples of providing general and simple rules and mechanics and allowing players to build incredibly complex things with them. Having everything only fit together in pre-scripted unique/exceptional cases is an opposite approach, kinda like in puzzle games.

• Not sure what's the reason for turrets to ignore non-red wisps.

  Also to be clear on "The turrets aren't meant to waste time and ammo on innocent wisps, but on fierce biters" point - they should not attack non-aggressive wisps at all by default, as they are at peace with the player and vice-versa (by default). Don't see why they shouldn't defend against attacking ones same as biters though.

• With red wisps I see two separate issues:

  • Performance problem on rapid damage and ensuing replication.

  • Just way too much replication on rapid low damage - default 0.2 factor is fine for most other cases, but not this one, some other limit or scaling should be applied here.

  Ignoring red wisps by rapid-fire turrets fixes both issues, by adding exception and disabling whole mechanic in that case.

  My idea was to add something like a token-bucket rate-limiting algo for red wisp replication events, with e.g. default rate=1/s burst=10 parameters, so that when rushing a water turret, there won't be immediately an explosion with 1000 of them, but just 10, with new one added every second until they overwhelm the turret and kill it.

  And while placing 10 such turrets can hold 20 biters indefinitely, one of these things will eventually overcome it, requiring different strategy than just "more dakka" (though tbf just UV lamps should stop them, so not that different) and maybe adding an occasional surprise "The F-" element, as red wisps should be pretty rare. But not game-ending, as they'll all be gone once sun comes out, breaking only some things.

But again, you guys probably know best, maybe simplier "just remove this stuff" fix is a better way to go for this mod combination.

It's probably best to defer to your and Augoeides' opinions on the matter, as you guys play with the combination of both mods and probably know best how they should interact.

Last time I played was February -- some weeks before I inherited "Water Turrets". Only starting Factorio for testing since then, so my perspective is limited to what I want my mod to do as well. Augoeides is the expert here when it comes to real games. :-)

From my limited perspective:

• I think making exceptional cases is counter-intuitive and a bad practice in general.

  Not to be avoided at all costs ofc, but just not ideal, as you have to make a rulebook for these and keep them all in mind, or otherwise plop down a turret and - surprise - it doesn't work as you expect it to on this one enemy!

  Factorio and similar games are actually best examples of providing general and simple rules and mechanics and allowing players to build incredibly complex things with them. Having everything only fit together in pre-scripted unique/exceptional cases is an opposite approach, kinda like in puzzle games.

Makes sense.

• Not sure what's the reason for turrets to ignore non-red wisps.

They shouldn't be ignored in the last release of Water Turrets. I imagine Augoeides didn't mention non-red wisps because they don't come with the same drop in performance as the red ones. If you meant my fix for the next release, it was just a case of "If I add one kind, why not go all the way?". But you're right, ignoring wisps is necessary only for the red kind as provoking them to replicate can slow down the game. So I'll remove green and yellow wisps from the ignore lists again.

Also to be clear on "The turrets aren't meant to waste time and ammo on innocent wisps, but on fierce biters" point - they should not attack non-aggressive wisps at all by default, as they are at peace with the player and vice-versa (by default). Don't see why they shouldn't defend against attacking ones same as biters though.

When looking for targets by script, I check if viable entities are enemies:

-- Check forces of turret and target
local f = target.force
local other = (turret.force ~= f)

-- Return true if target is an enemy of turret
local is_enemy = (  other and not turret.force.get_friend(f) and not turret.force.get_cease_fire(f) )

So peaceful wisps shouldn't be attacked in scripted mode, and in automatic mode the game wouldn't target non-enemies.

• With red wisps I see two separate issues:

  • Performance problem on rapid damage and ensuing replication.

  • Just way too much replication on rapid low damage - default 0.2 factor is fine for most other cases, but not this one, some other limit or scaling should be applied here.

  Ignoring red wisps by rapid-fire turrets fixes both issues, by adding exception and disabling whole mechanic in that case.

  My idea was to add something like a token-bucket rate-limiting algo for red wisp replication events, with e.g. default rate=1/s burst=10 parameters, so that when rushing a water turret, there won't be immediately an explosion with 1000 of them, but just 10, with new one added every second until they overwhelm the turret and kill it.

That seems like a good idea!

And while placing 10 such turrets can hold 20 biters indefinitely, one of these things will eventually overcome it, requiring different strategy than just "more dakka" (though tbf just UV lamps should stop them, so not that different) and maybe adding an occasional surprise "The F-" element, as red wisps should be pretty rare. But not game-ending, as they'll all be gone once sun comes out, breaking only some things.

Water turrets are not meant to be used alone, they just support the other turrets by giving them more time to attack the enemies.

But again, you guys probably know best, maybe simplier "just remove this stuff" fix is a better way to go for this mod combination.

Let Augoeides be the judge. :-D

Deleted -- thinko!

I'm not a programmer, but I think the slowdown issues lie more in the sudden graphical spam caused by the hundreds of appearing wisps, more than damage spam. I have a gaming PC, so I've experienced no issues with Factorio, even with ~100 Mods, until what I'll call "the red nova", haha. If I hadn't immediately picked up my Water Turret, my game would have most likely crashed, if not my PC too. It's definitely a limited issue though, only happening once, but it's still kind of important, as it has the potential to do damage beyond the game.

Anyway, I feel like the Red Wisp duplicate limitation would be the best coarse for everyone. While having the Red Wisp suddenly create an army might be an interesting anomaly, it's closer to being a punishment just for using Water Turrets. Also, you have to consider terms of aesthetics and Sci-fi realism. I'm willing to accept that an alien creature made of energy can split itself multiple times like an atom, but to see that entity suddenly split infinitely in the span of 1 second is pretty hard to accept, not to mention is kind of a disappointment.

After some though, I feel like setting the Red Wisp "initial" duplication limition to 1, with an another clone made once/per second would be the most acceptable thing to do, in terms of being fair to the player. While the suggested "limit of 10" doesn't sound so bad, you need to consider Player reaction time.

Let's say the Player has 2 bases, we'll call them Base Alpha and Base Beta. If the Player is at Alpha and immediately notices the alert about the Red Wisps, then looks at their base via the Map to determine if they should personally intervene, and decides to ride over in their car, upto 30 seconds could go by before they know what has happened and they have traveled from Alpha to Beta. This means when they finally arrive, the Water Turrets could have spawned at least 40 Wisps. By setting the limit to 1 (instead of 10) + once/second, this makes things more manageable (only down to 30, but still less punishing).

Also, it seems weird that Red Wisps would spawn once on death by normal means, but then suddenly spawn 10 when splashed with some water. That certainly is an alien chemical reaction, but as I understood it, the Wisps in general are essentially avatars of nature, so it's a little weird for them to suddenly "go Gizmo" when wet.

Honestly though, if the turrets are going to actively ignore the Wisps, then the clone limitations you put on Red Wisps don't really matter, as long as it's not infinite, so that people don't have that one-in-a-million combination like I did, and crash their computer for it. Obviously, there's still the rare chance that the turrets will splash a Red Wisp while shooting a Biter or putting out a fire, but as long as the Red Wisp doesn't explode infinitely, it won't break the game.

"the red nova", haha. If I hadn't immediately picked up my Water Turret, my game would have most likely crashed, if not my PC too.

I've seen it after using the editor to spawn some yellow (necessary as initiator because red wisps are ignored by the turrets now) and red wisps, with "Automated defenses shooting at everything" active. UPS went down to about 25 almost immediately. :-)

Anyway, I feel like the Red Wisp duplicate limitation would be the best coarse for everyone.

That definitely would have prevented the instant UPS drop.

After some though, I feel like setting the Red Wisp "initial" duplication limition to 1, with an another clone made once/per second would be the most acceptable thing to do, in terms of being fair to the player. While the suggested "limit of 10" doesn't sound so bad, you need to consider Player reaction time.

I'd agree here. Before the wisp detectors are researched, players must get a fair chance to intervene manually even if they are a bit farther away.

I don't really set forests on fire

Setting a forest on fire at night with the will-o-wisp mod (at mid-game tech: flamethrower, tank) is one of the best memories I have of Factorio. Suddenly those wisps you thought were a mere distraction (yellow ones) become dangerous.

The purple, though, always just seemed annoying without really adding anything, and those UV lamps: just having to place them is cost enough. If it were me I'd just remove the UV lamps and detectors and make the purple ones do no damage by default (or most of the time).

Added replication rate-limiting mod option with default rate=4/60 burst=50 in 0.3.10 to fix two issues mentioned above - performance drop due to rapid spawn (50 units limit) and too much replication on low-damage aoe attacks (after initial 50, 4/1s probably shouldn't add too many before source of that damage dies or kills them all).
Was too lazy to test with an actual water turret, but aside from performance, don't think there's much to tune, and pretty sure double-digit numbers should be safe.

If it were me I'd just remove the UV lamps and detectors and make the purple ones do no damage by default (or most of the time).

Yeah, probably a good idea for purples. Changed in 0.3.11 to have their damage as an opt-in annoyance instead of default-on one.

Don't think lamps and detectors clutter UI too much, and are otherwise entirely optional, so don't see much point removing them, even if purple ones are nerfed.
Lamps can be a useful fallback if turrets can't handle these things, or you don't want to have them everywhere yet need defences against wisps.

The Wisps LOVE to attack belt lines, which are generally strewn from outside one facility to another one, unless your using trains, although that's mostly reserved for larger hauls (I should probably use trains more often).

Did consider making belts immune to wisp attacks, but then thought then electric poles will follow, and pipes, and lamps, and whatever else people build between far bases instead of trains for whatever reason, and decided that proper fix with this mod is "just build trains and separate grids".

If it's too annoying, in prototypes/changes.lua, tweak changes.set_ectoplasm_immunity() to have this:
local immune_categories = utils.t('straight-rail curved-rail transport-belt underground-belt pipe pipe-to-ground')
You can also add whatever other "Prototype type" values there (probably easiest to lookup on factorio wiki), which should also apply to any modded entities within that category (e.g. modded belts, pipes, etc).

Also, it seems weird that Red Wisps would spawn once on death by normal means, but then suddenly spawn 10 when splashed with some water.

Not my idea, as it was in the original mod, but I kinda like the weirdness of that mechanic, and yeah, it seem to be very much in spirit of "wtf are these things" idea behind the mod.

That certainly is an alien chemical reaction

I'm thinking more along the lines of "if it's a glowing flying blob, splitting it into pieces will produce many glowing blobs" :)
And if it's a glowing animated liquid or vapor, pouring more liquid into it might not work to get rid of it.

the Wisps in general are essentially avatars of nature

Yeah, was thinking of adding fire ones specifically, as burning stuff is fun! But kinda lazy to do it.
Maybe making current red ones into blue ones (for water) with their mechanics would make more sense, and add something separate and spiky/tough for stone would make more sense from that elemental perspective.

Oh also, should probably add hook to spawn red ones for destroyed cliffs, as they are a kind of stone/rock too. For consistency, if nothing else.

I think 50 enemies suddenly spawning, with another 4 every seconds is really excessive. I originally installed this mod for aesthetics, and because constantly fighting Biters can be a little boring, especially given that their the only species on an entire planet. As stated before, if it takes me minute to get to the base where this is all going down, that means I'd have to potentially fight hundreds of wisps, just because of a water turret misfire/splash that was completely out of my control.

The elemental wisps sound interesting, as long as they have some balance in mind. The current wisps don't hit too hard, but with enough of them or when combined with a Biter attack, things get hairy. I remember one time I had to cut a thin line through a forest to connect a pipeline to an oil mining facility that didn't have access to water, and I ended up having to deal with 30 of the things at once, plus all the pipes they decided to tear apart.

I tried changing the settings you recommended in the LUA files, but when I tried to repackage everything as an archive, the game didn't recognize it as mod. I never had that trouble with mods in other games before, so I don't know what's wrong there. Unless there's some step I'm unaware of, customizing the LUA doesn't seem to be a casual option.

I remember one time I had to cut a thin line through a forest to connect a pipeline to an oil mining facility that didn't have access to water, and I ended up having to deal with 30 of the things at once, plus all the pipes they decided to tear apart.

Seems like a good use case for Hardened pipes. :-D

I tried changing the settings you recommended in the LUA files, but when I tried to repackage everything as an archive, the game didn't recognize it as mod.

You don't need to zip the folder again, you can play with unpacked mods as well. If you have multiple versions of a mod in the mods directory, the game will first try to the load the unpacked version with the highest version number.

I think 50 enemies suddenly spawning, with another 4 every seconds is really excessive.

Yeah, idea was to fix the performance issue, don't think difficulty defaults are an issue.
Though this does have side-effect of making them a lot easier already, as now you don't really have to deal with infinites - just go through burst limit and at the rate beyond that you can probably kill them with a starting pistol :)

Here's how a single gun turret with mid-range red ammo kills 50 wisps on default settings:
http://e.var.nz/wisps-demo.c95fjp2e440vy.mp4

That's after /cheat, so I think it also has all upgrades, but then again, that's one turret easily killing 50 reds spawned before replication limit even starts counting - something that you have to provoke, replicate and group like that, and that has very tiny chance of spawning in the first place.
Also they have pre-set death timer, can only do damage within like a minute of the game before expiring, and you can easily run away from them.

But everyone plays differently of course, and if that's too difficult, that's what mod settings are for - that replication limit is tunable right there.
Or you can just set them to a peaceful mode, which is indeed intended for people who just want to build stuff and don't care about any combat mechanics.

oil mining facility that didn't have access to water, and I ended up having to deal with 30 of the things at once, plus all the pipes they decided to tear apart.

You might also want to enable invulnerability for the pump(s) there, and maybe electric wires if you have these consume electricity (e.g. in K2 even offshore ones do).
That's the thing that kinda stopped me from expanding the list of invincible entries - there's no point at which it stops when you build wide like that, I think, so again, probably best to just disable wisp aggression entirely and not need to deal with any of that.

I actually do have Hardened Pipes installed, but despite it's length, the pipeline I made was intended to be temporary fixture. I have Noxys Waterfill installed, so in the long term, the plan is to create an artificial lake nearby the oil facility (plus it would liven up the landscape there), then I can just take the pipeline down, and maybe install a railway where it was, to bring the oil products back to the main area, or something like that (if I were a more efficient player, anyway).

I wasn't sure if I could place mods loosely into the folder. Most games allow that, while some prefer everything to be packaged, and since I casually glanced at installation guides that suggested that they needed in their default archived state, I just assumed it should be that way. Still weird that it wouldn't accept my archived version, since it should have been more or less packaged in the exact same way, with the same extensions. Whenever I get around to playing again, I'll try an unpacked version, and see if the game takes it.

Given that video, I suppose 50+ enemies isn't a big deal. In my unique encounter, all I had active was a Water Turret and some grenades, due to a Biter attack rendering my other turrets broken just before "the red nova" transpired. Kastoria 2 does have electric-dependent offshore pumps. And yeah, I can see that making some things invulnerable to the wisps may potentially trigger a chain reaction of "invincibility", which would negate the threat of the wisps, but I'm just talking about conveyor belts.

Really, if anything, you'd think the wisps would be attracted to electrical devices and high voltage facilities, similar to how Biters are attracted and consume pollution, so stringing lamps along the conveyor belts could draw them them to it. However, lamps are optional, even with amplified darkness mods, you don't really need them, the game is still playable. Although, it's arguably difficult to make in progress in Factorio without conveyor belts. I suppose the answer is to simply put a turret nearby the belts, but considering how many turrets you have to place just to protect a single facility, it's a bit annoying that the solution to most problems is "place more turrets". That's more or less the game in a nutshell though, I guess.

Really, if anything, you'd think the wisps would be attracted to electrical devices and high voltage facilities

Yeah, I think that was actually the plan with the original mod - to have wisps attach to electric poles and drain electricity.
Might be an interesting replacement for damaging attacks, for them to black-out your base instead.
But more work to implement, and doubt it's worth it, as I'm content with them being mostly ornamental.

Given that video, I suppose 50+ enemies isn't a big deal.

1000 isn't either, except for performance - 2-3 UV lamps will kill them all easily :)

Although, it's arguably difficult to make in progress in Factorio without conveyor belts
considering how many turrets you have to place just to protect a single facility

Never used long belts myself tbh, except in early game before trains, though I also like trains and always play on "rail world" type of maps, where everything is far apart, making belts very impractical.
Dunno how do you even get wisps to attack stuff with belts too - trains running these things over in the middle of nowhere was actually the only reason for making rails immune, otherwise they never attack anyway in my games, guess maybe you have that option to shoot them on sight turned on or something.

But at this point I'm pretty sure you're playing some different game entirely, so probably need vastly different settings for it :)

I actually do have Hardened Pipes installed, but despite it's length, the pipeline I made was intended to be temporary fixture.

I just double-checked, they don't provide protection agains electric damage or the new ectoplasm damage. But given that they're coated with plastic, that should insulate them enough to provide at least some protection against these, no full immunity, just some moderate resistance.

I wasn't sure if I could place mods loosely into the folder. Most games allow that, while some prefer everything to be packaged, and since I casually glanced at installation guides that suggested that they needed in their default archived state, I just assumed it should be that way. Still weird that it wouldn't accept my archived version, since it should have been more or less packaged in the exact same way, with the same extensions. Whenever I get around to playing again, I'll try an unpacked version, and see if the game takes it.

I suggest you look at factorio-current.log when you've got the menu after a fresh Factorio start. At the top, it checks what mods are available, finding the highest version of each mod, like this:

 1.633 Info ModManager.cpp:253: Found duplicate mod Maps, using higher version (1.0.4 > 1.0.1).
 1.635 Info ModManager.cpp:253: Found duplicate mod Maps, using higher version (1.0.5 > 1.0.4).
 1.638 Info ModManager.cpp:260: Found duplicate mod Maps, using folder version (1.0.5).

I think the problem may be that your zip file's name doesn't contain the version number. If you unpack Will-o-the-Wisps_updated_0.3.9.zip, you will get a new folder that's named just "Will-o-the-Wisps_updated". If you repack that, you should make sure that the zip file is named "Will-o-the-Wisps_updated_0.3.9.zip" again. To get the correct version number, take a look at info.json, there should be a line like this:

"version": "0.3.9",

So the name of the zip file must be BASENAME_VERSION.zip, with an underline between name and version number. In my own mods, I always include the version number in the folder name as well (because sometimes I need to have two versions of the mod unpacked into their own separate folders). But not including it may also make sense if it fits your workflow better, so the way Will-o-the-Wisps is packaged is still correct, just different. :-)