It looks very neat. The heat pump is a great addition. But I cant get at the heat exchanger and the vanila heat exchanger wont fire until at 500 C.

Heat pump was the most difficult prototype I've made to date. It has to be a reactor, which has a very strange way of dealing with heat pipe ends. That's why it doesn't look better. The only thing it's good for, at the moment and under this mod, is to create heat with which to do chemistry in the kettle reactors, which could also use any waste heat from your nuclear reactors. It's not meant to be balanced with the heat exchangers, since the game design implies that chemical burners aren't compatible with them by setting the temperatures too low. I might consider increasing the heat pump to a higher temperature, though. I set the heat pump to be less efficient than using chemical burner boilers, though. Just a bit less efficient. Note that it starts to take very long to heat things up with chemical fuel to high temps, though.

Some of these numbers make more sense in the context of my adamo physics mod, which reintroduces the efficiency mechanics (but normalized by temperature to retain vanilla ratios for blueprint compatibility). Maybe I'll upload that, too.

By the way, it appears to be impossible to make a heat generator that is powered by electricity. :-/

In that case you might consider doing a version of the heat pump, that could be used in combination with a heat exchanger, as that would come in very handy in a number of situations.

You might also consider changing the category for the reaction kettle. As is, it will be suggested for any recipe, that is traditionally done in the chemical plant. This is because they share the "chemistry" crafting category.

I will consider that! The reaction kettle is set that way on purpose. It does accept recipes from the chemical mod, and it was originally part of that mod, but now it also does chemistry recipes, however, it is restricted to only recipes that take 1 or 0 items in their ingredients, and only 1 fluid output. So it's sort of a limited chemical plant that runs on heat, which is, well, a reaction kettle! :D When run with adamo chemical you should be able to do any of your druglab recipes in the reaction kettle that fit those restrictions, but, they're not going to be well-organized. I'm still deciding how I want to split up recipes in the chemical engineering recipe tab. Any ideas?

But the heat pump reaction kettle combo makes a lot of sense! You should put some screenshots and explanations up though. People will not randomly try out all combinations.

Oh, OK, will do.

Ah - with the restrictions in items and the requirement for the heat pump, it actually does not "break the game" in any way. Just need to wrap my head around the concept! Cudos for finding something so original at the center of the game!

Next suggestion is that you or I make a mining drill that will accept a heat pipe as a requirement for doing fire-flooding tar sand mining at a much higer rate than the steam driven surface mining.

https://www.onepetro.org/conference-paper/SPE-5568-MS

Cheers, Shenpen! good share, I'll check out the technique; that could be an interesting machine to play with.

I still think your description and explanation text is pants. I will have a go at writing up something that will make more sense to the average user and suggest you make use of that if you agree. Not right now though. Perhaps you could make a developer thread in the forum?

The reaction kettle:
As any chemical process will happen faster under hot conditions, adding heat to a chemical process makes great sense if and when you want to have more produce or spend less time. At the chemical level of reality heat is actually speed. The reaction kettle is a specialized chemical plant, that makes great use of that principle: Accepting input via a heat pipe, it will support a number of chemical reactions at a much higher rate. There are certain limitations regarding input items, but the reaction kettle is a great addition to your standard factory equipment. Besides the higher production rate, smaller size can also be a great benefit under certain circumstances.

The still does not show up in crafting menu. Also not mentioned in the techonology "Heat processing" effects.

The still actually does show up in crafting menu, but hard to spot. Stil is not mentioned in the techonology "Heat processing" effects. Is enabled? Should be "behind research"?

Oh, the still should show up in the "fluid handling technology", I believe. Let me double check that everything is in the right places. Thanks. I meant to put the reaction kettle next to the chemical plant in the crafting menu; will double check that. And the still should be... somewhere near there. Let me double check everything.

I checked all of the recipes and I'm confident they're all assigned properly to technologies. Find them in fluid-handling, electric-engine, and adamo-cinefaction-heat-processing. I've found that the game is inconsistent (to my current pattern-finding abilities) in whether it applies new recipes to existing games. I try to avoid adding a control script to a mod, especially just to do something as simple as run force.reset_technology_effects(), but I've found in this mod that at least the gas-fired boiler doesn't show up without running the reset_technology_effects function. If anything isn't showing up, still, please let me know.

I'll post the update shortly.

Thanks for the description suggestion. I didn't use it in the current form but it definitely got integrated and helped me figure out what else to say.

Regarding the recipes after an update: Take a look at the code towards the end of the page in this thread:
https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=190&t=44182&start=20

Are you sure this code works in a migration file? I know I can do this from control.lua, but I hate that. Edit: Oh, come to think of it, I hadn't thought of using a .lua migration file. Well, I'll think about that! But the info is right there in the technologies, so I'm a bit stuck on "this should be fixed in the base game, which should detect whether new recipes should be added to each force, rather than having us mod in the check each time".

Not sure about anything lately. But I have had no bad results and never think about the included file.

OK, thanks for the tip!