Hey, I just finished a game with your mod and had loads of fun with it. I want to give (perhaps quite extensive) feedback, because you deserve it and this may help to make it even better.
The overall impression is: This mod has a very cool basic idea and an already very good realization. Right now its almost unknown, but this has the potential to become a really popular big mod. Perhaps some day one of the big streamers/youtubers gives you a feature and generates much more attention. It would certainly deserve it.
There were a few rather annoying situations during the playthrough and rough corners and I want to report them and propose solutions, hopefully helping to make some improvements and an even better experience for later players.
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Some of the nutrient recipes are just traps as they yield less than they cost. Example: Egg bread yields 4 lvl1 nutrients, but already the egg costs 5 of these. This is pure loss. I am pretty sure this is not the only one, given the huge number of nutrient recipes.
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Green science is too expensive. The complexity is fine, but the raw cost is too heavy, at least halve it. Just math it out, how many machines you need for 1/s green science, you will be baffled. Some numbers: The final factory had 1.6K greenhouses and 1.2K machines, drawing 660 MW. Green science was already a roughly a quarter of this, I remember that we hit 160 MW when green science started. So much repetitive building by hand. This also makes playing with biters very hard, because they find the large amount of smell from your factory really attractive, but you only get absolute shit (red science) military. I never knew that medium biters can be so hard to defend...
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On the other hand, yellow and purple science felt quite simple, small and cheap. They could use a buff. You can compute the raw costs for these as well and decide. Btw: I really liked that you placed purple as last science.
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By FAR the biggest complaint: The overall concept of nutrients as feedback loop is fantastic. But the realization was sometimes really annoying. You research a new nutrient level and get 50 recipes, that all look the same and 80%-90% of them are impossible at the moment you finish the research. So the game plan is: Review them all and find the one, you can actually produce. Furthermore: Alternative ways to victory are cool, but 50 are just confusing and also irrelevant. I never used more than 3 different recipes per level and I promise you hardly anybody will. So you essentially decide which 10% of the content you actually use. Finally: The recipe selector presented in the FAQ did not work for me.
Constructive proposals:
a) only unlock the recipes with the nutrient technology, you can directly build
b) unlock further recipes with the technologies of the corresponding bakery (like advanced baking etc)
c) dramatically reduce the number of combinations. Two recipes you can use right away and two more shortly after are enough. 4 alternative ways to progress are better than 50
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Doubling the production of low-level goods again and again is one of the tedious tasks in factorio. Proposal: Instead of throwing all the current-level bakery goods into current-level nutrients, unlock better and better recipes for lower-level nutrients as you progress. Example: Milk-level gives a new lvl1-recipe with 50% increased yield, and cocoa again 50% more and so on, eventually you may convert a strawberry pie into 100 lvl1 nutrients. This serves three purposes: You find use cases for all baked goods (after dramatically reducing the number of recipes, see 4.), you give an incentive to design something new and reduce the effort to scale up. It also introduces the alternative recipes for any lvl piecewise, which makes it much easier to digest. Important: The increase must be significant (at least 50% in my opinion) to give a good incentive over just copying the old build once more.
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The milk filtering recipe was a huge (I say absolutely neccessary) improvement, but man is it slow. I had over 200 chemplants with this at the end, and half of them built by hand - not fun. Please at least double the speed.
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The raw strawberry cake does not work, it yields a blueberry cake. Hence, lvl7 nutrients are impossible. But they are not useful anyway right now. Idea how to fix that: Place them before space science pack and include some in the satelite. You could rename it to interstellar food delivery or something.
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I am always very sad, when a mod designer flat out disallows productivity modules everywhere. I can guess and understand the reasons: It is more difficult to balance and modders are generally reluctant to give free stuff. But as I see it, no prod modules just takes away one interesting design option. Moreover, prod modules do a very good thing: They shift the balance from raw and basic goods towards the more advanced (and usually interesting) stuff. This is also what makes megabases really feasible and fun to build. Without prod modules, megabases are 80-90% raw ingredients and basic stuff. In principle, this mod could be super for creating megabases, as it does hardly rely on mined ressources, but right now its not really attractive. For some mods with very long intermediate chains the compounding effect of prod can get crazy and completely screw the balance, but I do not see the risk here. Moreover, you can always double the costs of the last two science packs to balance it out.
Therefore the proposal: Activate prod modules for well-chosen set of recipes. I would propose:
Keep disabled: Any directly recursive recipe (of course), anything that bakes a single cake or decorates it, nutrients (debatable, but these could scale via better recipes)
Enable: Other intermediates like cake batter, raw cake forming, uncountable stuff like butter/frosting, extracting (wheat->flour, sugar cane->sugar etc.)
Finishing words: Although the majority of the post are ideas for improvements, I hope it did not come along, as if I did not like it. I did like it a lot! The mod is already great to play in the current state. Thanks a lot and keep up the great work!
