Agritario

Ore is grown, not dug.

Agritario turns every ore patch into a field of mineral soil. Instead of mining ore, you plant stromatolites on the soil. They drain it as they grow and harvest into cores, and every core holds bacteria that spoil into ore, plus a seed for the next generation. A seed's quality is the plant's level, so a better seed grows a faster, richer stromatolite that is easier on the soil. Exhausted fields don't stay dead: restoration towers bring them back.

Requires Factorio 2.1 with Space Age and Quality. The graphics come in a separate mod, Agritario Graphics, which is installed automatically as a dependency.

Beta. Agritario is in beta testing. Balance, recipes and mechanics will change based on your feedback, criticism and suggestions, so please report bugs and share ideas on the mod's discussion page.

About this mod. The idea, design and direction are by VoiderFox. The code and part of the graphics were made with the help of AI (Claude by Anthropic).

Help wanted. Any help improving the mod is welcome: graphics, balance, translations, testing or code. Get in touch on the mod's discussion page.

How it works

1. Soil instead of ore. Iron, copper, uranium and tungsten patches on Nauvis and Vulcanus become soil, and so do Gleba's farmland. Fulgora and Aquilo are left as they are. Coal, stone and calcite can become soil too (startup setting).
2. Wild stromatolites grow on fresh soil. Mining one is how you get your first core, and that core unlocks Stromatolite core processing.
3. Plant and harvest.
4. A stromatolite can only be planted on its own soil. When planted, it drains the 10×10 square around it.
5. Planting is refused if the soil there is too poor.
6. Plant by hand, with the small basic agricultural tower, or with the agricultural tower and its Mk2.
7. Cores.
8. A harvest gives cores and moist remnants.
9. 1–3 cores carry the seed's quality, with a chance of one tier higher; this is your breeding line. The rest come out normal, with a chance of quality.
10. Processing a core gives 10 bacteria and, most of the time, a seed.
11. Uranium cores need sulfur to process, and tungsten cores need sulfuric acid.
12. A core rots into a remnant after an hour.
13. Bacteria spoil into ore. This is your ore supply. Ship them fast, or culture them in a bioreactor once you have been to Gleba.
14. Keep the soil alive.
15. Exhausted tiles turn grey.
16. Composters (early) and restoration towers (later) pour remnants and spoilage back into the ground.
17. Enrichment barrels carried by construction robots make a field richer than it ever was.

Seed quality

Fertilizer towers and capsules can raise single parameters of a plant by one level. Pollution and daylight speed up growth. Vulcanus gets more sun, and Gleba a little less.

Buildings and items

Early game
- Composter. A fuel-free furnace that composts remnants or spoilage into the soil around it.
- Stromatolite scoop, three tiers. Thrown like a capsule: it pulls wild stromatolites in the area for their seeds and harvests ripe planted ones.
- Remnant sieve. Hand-sift remnants for a little ore.
- Remnant path. A walkable path made from remnants.
- Basic agricultural tower. A small electric tower long before Gleba.

Mid game
- Core press, with a Mk2 after Gleba.
- Built-in productivity (+25% / +50%) and an 80% seed chance.
- Quality modules are allowed.
- Squeezes stromatolite juice out of every core.
- Also presses remnants into fuel briquettes.
- Restoration tower, three recipe tiers. Revives exhausted soil and tops up poor tiles.
- Fertilizer tower and fertilizer capsules.
- Pollinator. Raises the quality chance of harvests in its range.
- Soil sensor. Sends soil, exhausted tiles, plant count and fertilizer time to the circuit network.
- Range modules for the restoration, fertilizer and pollinator towers.
- Stromatolite harvester and hub. Small spiders that harvest ripe plants and replant them.
- Soil enrichment. Mark soil with the enrichment planner, and construction robots pour enrichment barrels on it: up to 8000 soil per tile, past the 5000 a restoration tower stops at.

Late game
- Bioreactor, after Gleba. Cultures bacteria straight into ore.
- Orbital cultivator. Grows stromatolites on a space platform, so a platform can get ore without asteroids.
- Infinite research:
- Soil efficiency: more harvest, less soil drained.
- Bacteria strains: bioreactor productivity.
- Core fertility: one more bacterium per core per level.

Soil fatigue. Big fields wear out. A restoration tower or composter with more than 40 stromatolites in range works below full strength. Several smaller fields restore better than one huge one.

SeaBlock mode

A startup setting that remakes Nauvis:
- The world. Nauvis becomes a sea around a small starting island, with no ore, trees, rocks or crude oil.
- Land. Land is soil landfill, laid on water or ground. A laid tile can only be taken up once its soil is used up.
- Starting kit. You start with rich landfill of each starting soil, plus seeds and tree seeds.
- Crafted landfill is far thinner than the starting landfill. Both amounts can be set.
- Uranium. Uranium landfill comes from chemistry. The first uranium seed is a rare mutation of iron and copper harvests.
- Oil comes from pyrolysis of coal remnants.
- Biters live only on islands far out (1000–3000 tiles, adjustable). Promethium science still gets its eggs, and biters can't cross the water.

Settings

Compatibility

• Ores from other mods, such as Krastorio 2, Bob's and Angel's, become soil with their own stromatolites when Ores of other mods is on.
• An ore qualifies when its mined item has the same name as its resource.
• Its graphics are a shared grey set tinted with the ore's map colour.
• It is unlocked like uranium: by mining its soil for the first time.
• Quality Plants: Agritario's plants opt out of it, so quality is never applied twice.
• Adding to an existing save works: ore already on the map is converted to soil when the game loads.

Credits

Everything else was designed for this mod.