I realise that this discussion would be more convenient on other forums, but I have my boundaries and reasons. Feel free to copy my prose wherever you want for discussion if so desired.

I have run a trial stress test on my 'advanced ore processing 4' setup. I have very nearly the best buildings unlocked in terms of module slots, and am using the +10% modules - the best I will have for some time - in everything.

I am very barely non-negative on limestone (/quicklime).

This rules out continuing to use it in glass manufacture. It presents issues with holmium production going forward. And, it only works on Nauvis, and will not be possible on planets which have a major resource requiring quicklime in the production chain.

I was incorrect in believing that I have a limestone core-minable surface in the Calidus system. In fact I haven't found one yet, and if I did it would likely be prohibitively expensive.

I have 3 ideas on what might be done to fix this.

1) Calcium production chain makes useless calcium chloride. This could and even should have a pathway back to calcium. This would decrease the reliance of holmium production on base, non-module-boosted limestone. This is more of a mitigation than a full solution.

2) Add a dirty water to limestone recipe. This would unlock at about the same time as limestone demand goes crazy, and would solve the balance completely, except in the brief window where you first need some holmium, but have not yet done the advanced ore processing research. And even that appears to be technically optional as I can't see any holmium in the material science pack 3 chain.

3) Use appropriate materials in the refinement chain. While I can't help you with coding, because I suck at even the most basic stuff, I am a proficient chemist. AngelBobs had precisely two things which were blatantly chemically nonsense (one is hilarious because it's basically the same mistake that the fool who tried to set his shoes on fire on a plane that one time made, resulting in no boom). This pack has hundreds. To be clear this isn't a criticism - it's a game mod. But it represents an opportunity to replace quicklime with more appropriate ingredients.

For example, quicklime in iron ingot production - big tick. Quicklime in gold ingot production - no way. Chlorine, or better aqua regia are better choices. Drawing up a list of suitable replacements which have a chance to improve the balance rather than just make it worse would be time consuming on my part. Partly because I doubt you would want answers like "yeah you need to add cyanide". So I'd need to pick the least inappropriate thing in many cases. I'm happy to do it, but only if I'm asked to do it.

Update. My stress test wasn't stressful enough, it seems. I am negative on limestone.

Thanks for all your feedback and proposals. I know it often doesn't make sense. But it's not in the scope of this modpack to make sense of mods we just depend on or in other words: others made things that (chemically) partially don't make sense and we just integrated them. That doesn't mean we shouldn't improve things. It's mostly a matter of where to put it and who does it.

... aaand I need to watch my son. I'll finish my thoughts later. Sorry for the delay.

The third option wasn't something I expected to be implemented. I want to be clear that I would help in any way that I can - but the ways I can are very limited because of my (lack) of relevant skills.

Options 1 and 2 together seem like a very good fix to me. Reduce how much limestone needs to be exported to holmium producing planets, by adding a loop which improves the 1 for 1 for ~0.35 limestone-calcium-holmium ingot chain. Then make sure that the dirty water to limestone recipe is high yield, not 0.1 probability.

Does it mean no problems? Of course not. On waterless planets it will be needed to import ice or use the lower tier recipes. On eg. an iron core mining world, the iron will need to be processed through lower tier chain. I think this is fair and balanced and in the spirit of compromise. But Nauvis should kind of just work IMO.

Real estate on Nauvis is enough of an issue with this huge modpack that I don't think I can run tier 3 and 4 refining side by side with circuit conditions. I am right now literally trying to work out which resources I am going to build over and landfill over as I continue to upgrade Nauvis to a base capable of reaching the endgame.

Somehow my answer got lost...

So I asked for feedback on this on the Discord server. I got the feedback that Limestone is not unbalanced. I have the same opinion. It's one of the least used resources. I think it's good it has a use here.

It appears to me that you want to rely 100% on core mining. That is not a goal for this modpack. Use the ore patches on Nauvis to balance it. If you are out of limestone on Nauvis then you made some very strange decisions for the map generation. And you would run out of most other resources long before limestone is empty.

But I added a dirty water filtration recipe for limestone. And it gives the ore, not the powder.

It's also worth keeping in mind that until the resource spawning bug in SE is fixed (or unless you apply my patch yourself), limestone (along with almost all other resources added by mods) are only going to spawn patches on Nauvis, which is... not really the sort of resource availability I think anyone had in mind when putting this together.

I don't know where other people are up to. This was not a problem at all until ore processing 4. And specifically until trying to change all processes to ore processing 4. Which I think is a reasonable thing to do. You could argue that using circuit conditions to switch between the tier 3 and 4 recipes is an option but the fact is that I DO NOT HAVE THE REAL ESTATE. I Didn't change the map gen settings at all. I have had to throw down several warehouses full of landfill to get what I needed to build my upstream resource processing - to plates/ingots, and it's not scalable, but probably doesn't need to be.

In fact I have 2.3M limestone that I can access, and the rest is infested. I chose not to tap this yet, as there is a secret 4th option I didn't mention... Bin everything except limestone for several hours.

As for the not only using core mining... well that would just increase my limestone demand wouldn't it? ;)

I have a setup which directs dirty water to the most needed resource now. I'll add some combinators for the new recipe and see if that addresses the shortfall.

But, I'll reiterate that currently unless I'm binning much of my income, I'm negative on limestone before making calcium for imersite or decorative concrete. Mining anything but limestone will not fix this. Only running lower tier refining would fix this.

It's also worth keeping in mind that until the resource spawning bug in SE is fixed (or unless you apply my patch yourself), limestone (along with almost all other resources added by mods) are only going to spawn patches on Nauvis, which is... not really the sort of resource availability I think anyone had in mind when putting this together.

It's hard to say for sure, but I have a good feeling that even the things I have noted are a little unbalanced are not that bad. I do not see a future where I am critically and chronically short of anything (except limestone), and I've only yet to go after vitamelange and naqutite.

So isn't the real problem that all other resources get improvements from the ore processing research so less is used but limestone doesn't have that?

Nope. The problem is that using enriched resources to ingots doesn't require limestone in the form of quicklime, but unlocks the ability to balance your shortfall. The next tier, pure, slots in behind that in the chain and doesn't require any special resources either. Moving to pellets then gives your base a permanent limestone shortfall which never goes away unless there is some endgame tech I haven't considered.

Limestone is not produced in sufficient quantity from core mining to refine the other resources from core mining. Even if you say that core mining shouldn't be able to supply your base singularly (I don't think I agree with that in principle, but it's your mod so my opinion here isn't so important), it's still a problem. If your iron mine runs dry you run out of iron. If your limestone mine runs dry you deadlock on everything. When you run out of limestone you'd better have won the game because otherwise you are rebuilding your base to downgrade everything. And too bad if the only other patch is on the other side of the world under some behemoth worms. If you removed core mining as a mechanic, you'd deplete the limestone on your world first of any resource, and by a considerable margin.

I don't think it's even the same situation as pyroflux, which you are negative on as well. As this can be imported (as precursors) in enormous quantities for near enough no cost. If there was a guaranteed spawn of a limestone core world with low threat, I'd call it a logistics problem. But as it stands, I call it a balance problem.

Oh yeah and another easy way to rectify it which I just realised, is to increase the yield of limestone from core mining. It doesn't need to be very positive.

Here is a table showing the shortfall for various prod modules. It is substantial.

ores prod quicklime pure rich pellet ingot quicklime needed
module
16.88 0.04 0.696 18.9056 22.68672 25.4091264 10.16365056 4.2348544
16.88 0.06 0.754 19.9184 25.89392 30.5548256 13.2404244267 5.0924709333
16.88 0.08 0.812 20.9312 29.30368 36.3365632 16.9570628267 6.0560938667
16.88 0.1 0.87 21.944 32.916 42.7908 21.3954 7.1318
16.88 0.12 0.928 22.9568 36.73088 49.9539968 26.6421316267 8.3256661333
16.88 0.14 0.986 23.9696 40.74832 57.8626144 32.7888148267 9.6437690667
16.88 0.16 1.044 24.9824 44.96832 66.5531136 39.93186816 11.0921856

Great. It deleted all the tabs to make a huge mess.

You get .696 and 1.044 quicklime and need 4.23 and 11.09 to refine everything else, at 4% and 16% prod . As you get better prod modules it gets worse, because you have a bigger exponential chain for the ores.

If you want to normalise it by ingots it gets better in terms of the shortfall per ingot with higher productivity, but still a shortfall

I've been thinking about this for a while. In semi-arbitrary order...

-I don't really agree with calcium chloride being useless; I've wished I could manufacture it by itself as a way to ship "dehydrated mineral water" to my vitamelange planet in a previous game. Still, having only one way to use a byproduct that can't be fed back into it's producing reaction feels bad IMO. A way to at least partially reclaim it for use in processing more holmium sounds like a good idea to me.

-If "calcium plates" are going to be made with imersite, maybe it should have a name that indicates imersite is in there. (Also, I'm looking at this file, and... is this gonna glitch if someone has limestone and SE but not K2 enabled?)

-I'm pretty much certain at this point the se-bismuth-glass recipe is wrong, I'm just not sure what's right yet. Expect a PR from me on this sometime. When I figure out WTF is going on with that whole thing. Which could take a while.

-Some google searching found mentions of using quicklime to remove impurities from non-reactive metals (with copper and gold specifically mentioned), and I further found a company selling the stuff with information on their website talking about using it in the processing of both those metals. Given that, I feel it's use in the refinement chain is "close enough for Factorio purposes" - it's probably not suuuper accurate, but there's only so far we can go while maintaining a consistent chain across all the materials that go through that chain (or at least most of them). And when you get right down to it, I'm pretty sure having a variable chain in the main modpack is a non-starter. Maybe someone will want to make a mod that changes things up sometime? Or that replaces ATOM's refinement chain entirely with AB/BA (for Even More Overhauls). But I wouldn't expect either anytime soon.

-The fact that most use for limestone is probably going to involve turning it into quicklime, and that never really changes other than doing it in better buildings, is a bit boring. That being said, I don't know what you could really add to it either.

-(This one is directly addressed to ants9000's last two post) I understand what you're saying about the limestone output of core mining relative to other materials, but ultimately I don't think this fits in with SE's design intent. It's ultimately supposed to be a supplement to regular mining, with some of that regular mining fully expected to be done on other planets. (And possibly some of the refnining too.) And if you can't do that right away, sometimes you'll need to prioritize. That's the kind of mod SE is by itself, I think. ATOM cranks it up but didn't really invent the dynamic.

-Also is it really that difficult to make a build that can switch between pellets and non-pellet based on quicklime availability? Because it really doesn't seem like it ought to be.

It's more an ingredient in holmium than in imersite, I think.

My PhD in chemistry brain is turned off and will stay that way - I wont get into it - it's been made clear that this isn't meant to be super realistic and that's fine, and if I did get into it I would be ranting for literally pages.

I think you said that limestone is only available on Nauvis? Even if that changes, I don't feel like restarting 500+ hours into what I predict will be a 1500h game. If it's not only available on Nauvis, then it's certainly not common on the planets where it should be one of the top ores.

AND... discounting core mining entirely, it needs to be quadrupled on Nauvis to be balanced. Though there is a question as to whether you expect to deplete the whole planet. Still, it will be depleted much faster, and that's not accounting for the other recipes it would be useful for but isn't near essential to be used in.

I did kind of address the switching between tier 3 and 4 thing but it may have been lost in the many posts. It's not a difficult problem from the POV of making some more buildings and some logic - and I suck at advanced logic. But it is from the POV of the footprint, particularly when you consider that the way that extremely wide busses such as those forced by this mod start to consume land at a scale which is between width and area - ie. it scales more than linearly - and so doubling the number of belts would more than double the footprint.

Maybe in this case with the same input and output it wouldn't be that bad - and it would only double the width of a 50 by 5 chunk design. Which wouldn't fit on any continent on my Nauvis. It would arguably be better to just call it when it's too hard to source quicklime and downgrade everything and take the hit. That would be a fairly simple change and I could probably do it in an hour. And it took tens of hours to finalise my design around the constraints of available land and ease of feeding a bus while also being able to train the outputs to a space elevator.