Beyond Vanilla - QoL+

About

Beyond Vanilla - QoL+ builds on top of Beyond Vanilla - QoL modpack, adding a number of smaller elements to vanilla gameplay that enhance the game progression and make early, mid, and late game stages slightly less tedious and more interesting.

It is designed for players that want to preserve the vanilla progression towards launching a rocket and building a megabase, while making the entire process more enjoyable.

It should be particularly well suited for players that find the early manual build process boring after spending hours and hours with the benefits that bot construction brings, as well as for players that want to improve their build experience in the late game.

Design decisions for the modpack are (in addition to those outlined by Beyond Vanilla - QoL modpack):

• Preserve the original rocket launch progression.
• Speed-up the early game.
• Reduce early, mid, and late game tedium.
• Smooth out personal equipment and transportation progression.
• Introduce functional visual enhancements.

When it makes sense to do so, the modpack does deviate from listed principes if it significantly improves the playing experience.

Features

Listed features build on top of Beyond Vanilla - QoL modpack. Please make sure to check out the feature list there as well.

Construction

• Automatically mark depleted miners for deconstruction (Auto Deconstruct)

  Stop those idle miners from just sitting around and wasting energy. Uranium ore miners get replaced with pipes (to keep the sulfuric acid flowing).

• Early-game constructions bots (Early Construction)

  Start off with early-game single-use construction bots. They might not be cheap, but it beats constructing everything by hand.

Controls

• [OPTIONAL] Modpack controls configuration

  If modpack controls configuration has been enabled for the (dependant) Beyond Vanilla - QoL modpack, some additional controls are set-up by this modpack as well.

Equipment

• Additional personal armor and power production options (Portable Power, Simply Power Armor MK3)

  Early-game burner-based power generation, late-game portable nuclear reactor, and late-game power armor with increased equipment grid size. Makes remote base construction ever so less tedious.

Miscellaneous

• Dynamic displays for circuit network signals (Nixie Tubes)

  Keep track of signals provided by your circuit networks through use of stylish displays.

• Access power generation values via circuit networks (Power Combinator)

  Access information about power production and consumption, and utilise these values in circuit network. Cut-off parts of the base if power production is too low, or generate alerts if power production is insufficient.

• Additional lighting options beyond small lamps (Larger Lamps, Solar Lamp)

  Light up your base like never-before. From early-game burner-based copper lamp, over large and floor lamps, and all the way to eco-friendly (minus all the pollution requires to produce them...) solar lamps.

Planning/organisation

• Small, medium, and large display plates for marking the factory (Industrial Display Plates)

  Mark out parts of factory with clearly visible display plates that show item and signal icons. Better visibility alternative to using combinators for designating inputs/outputs, or chest contents for the early-game mall. WARNING: Due to modding API limitations, updating existing blueprints will not preserve industrial plate information - a new blueprint needs to be created instead.

• Decorative text plates (Text Plates)

  Use decorative text plates of various designs to mark and organise the factory, or name the outposts.

• Output required construction items as signals (Ghost Scanner)

  Scans for ghosts in logistic network, and outputs items required for construction as signals. NOTE: In order to avoid lowering game performance, ghost scanner combinator is limited to processing a maximum of 1000 ghost entities at a time.

Transportation

• Nuclear reactor-powered locomotive (Nuclear Locomotives)

  Faster and more powerful locomotive, powered by uranium fuel cells. NOTE: Original mod recipe has been changed to require nuclear reactor as an ingredient, making it substantially more expensive. This has been done for both immersion and balancing purposes.

• Lightweight plane for reconnaissance and exploration (Raven)

  Small lightweight flying vehicle useful for aerial exploration. Requires runway to take off and land.

• Pull vehicles along with a train (Vehicle Wagon 2)

  Load vehicle onto a wagon, and pull them along with personal train. Never leave a base without a fully kitted-out, loaded-up car or tank again.

Contributions

Nothing is perfect, and neither is this modpack (author). Should you come upon bugs, or have features and ideas on how to make the modpack better, please do not hesitate to voice your feedback either through mod portal discussion page, or through project's issue tracker. Pull requests for implementing new features and fixing encountered issues are always welcome.

The modpack heavily relies on tweaking different mod settings. With that in mind, please first report any crashes or bugs you encounter while playing the modpack here in order to avoid creating unnecessary load on the original mod authors. Detailed reproduction steps, starting from pristine state (in terms of mod/modpack settings etc) are preferred. If reporting the issues upstream (to mod authors), please try to reproduce them without having the entire modpack enabled, and with minimum changes to default mod settings.

Known issues

In addition to items listed here, please also have a look at known issues for Beyond Vanilla - QoL modpack.

Credits

As the old metaphor goes, this modpack stands on the shoulders of the giants. It would never be possible to create if it were not for both Wube Software's dedication to the game and its modding capabilities, nor without the many modders that have selflessly contributed their time and effort to creation of all the wonderous mods that are included in this modpack.

I salute you, and thank you for making all of this possible and available in such a user-friendly form!

License

All code, documentation, and assets implemented as part of this modpack are released under the terms of MIT license (see the accompanying LICENSE) file, with the following exceptions:

• assets/ice-cream-cone.svg, by Delapouite under CC BY 3.0, used in creation of modpack thumbnail.
• assets/swiss-army-knife.svg, by Delapouite under CC BY 3.0, used in creation of modpack thumbnail.

All individual mods that are included by this modpack have their own licensing terms. For details please have a look at individual mod pages on Factorio Mods portal.