Hi,
first of all I really like your mods, because they make things more complex and they working quite well together.

But why is Foundry not optional for Aluminium?
The foundry is very slow for the mid / late game and personally I don't really like the graphics (doesn't look like a foundry at all to be honest)

May it be possible to have aluminium as a stand alone mod as the other mods?
Also having more intermediate recipes would be nice, because some recipes need up to 8 ingredients and this is hard to scale in big factories.

Hi, thanks for the feedback! So I think i have some ideas on how to address your request.

First, some background: Basically, part of the reason I initially made Foundry was to enable more complex "furnace-like" recipes, especially leading to things like alloys. However, vanilla furnaces can only take a single ingredient. It's unlikely this will ever change, according to the factorio developers. I didn't want to rely on assemblers for alloys and such, as it didn't have the right feel for what I was going for.

So as for why it's required for aluminum -- aluminum as a metal is nearly always used alloyed, so I wanted to include that.

As for the graphics, they're definitely a little raw. As I improve at 3d modeling I may take another pass one day. It still won't look like a real foundry, as that wouldn't fit the aesthetic of vanilla factorio, and I want to stick as close to that as I am able to. But I'll try to make it look a little more "dirty-but-high-tech-punk" the way vanilla manages. Regardless, I doubt I can compete with Pyanadon's, Krastor's, or Arch666Angel's graphical styles :)

I wish it was possible to have sometimes-required dependencies based on mod startup settings, but this is not something the Factorio developers have decided to do. It's not too bad to workaround so I understand why they didn't do it.

Ultimately, to keep the default, I'm going to keep Foundry as a dependency. But here's what I'm thinking:

I'll add a "minimal mode" setting to Foundry that will make it seem mostly like it's not there:

• Disable foundry buildings,
• Remove coke.
• Keep steel, tungsten carbide, silicon, etc as one-ingredient furnace recipes.
• Move other founding recipes like alloys, crucible, cermet, etc to assemblers.

This will allow the default experience of alloy production to use the foundry building, but make it easy to disable for anyone who doesn't like it. Might take a few days to get to this.

Also -- which recipes are you currently finding harder to scale? I tried to move a few high-quantity recipes back to the 6-ingredient or 4-ingredient thresholds with some intermediates. But there are some "mall" recipes that require more than 6 still.

First, some background: Basically, part of the reason I initially made Foundry was to enable more complex "furnace-like" recipes, especially leading to things like alloys. However, vanilla furnaces can only take a single ingredient. It's unlikely this will ever change, according to the factorio developers. I didn't want to rely on assemblers for alloys and such, as it didn't have the right feel for what I was going for.

Ahh okay now I understand the purpose of that Foundry.

So as for why it's required for aluminum -- aluminum as a metal is nearly always used alloyed, so I wanted to include that.

Hmm or how about:
1. Making an "aluminium alloy mix" in the assembler (aluminium, Titanium,copper, ..)
2. Use forge (or tinted one as foundry) to cast raw aluminium alloy from the aluminium alloy mix
3. use assembler to craft aluminium bars, gerars, etc.. from the alumnium alloy

I would also love to have a real foundry, but it should be much bigger (like the SE Recycler) :)

As for the graphics, they're definitely a little raw. As I improve at 3d modeling I may take another pass one day. It still won't look like a real foundry, as that wouldn't fit the aesthetic of vanilla factorio, and I want to stick as close to that as I am able to. But I'll try to make it look a little more "dirty-but-high-tech-punk" the way vanilla manages. Regardless, I doubt I can compete with Pyanadon's, Krastor's, or Arch666Angel's graphical styles :)

Yeah I unterstand that it's very hard to make theses models. I just wanted to mention it and sadly I think that's the main reason why perople try the avoid this mod.

Also -- which recipes are you currently finding harder to scale? I tried to move a few high-quantity recipes back to the 6-ingredient or 4-ingredient thresholds with some intermediates. But there are some "mall" recipes that require more than 6 still.

I guess there is no ingredient limit in the recipe, but there is a limit of full belts that can fit into an assembler.
Also hauling 7+ ingredients to one place and trying to build a factory chaing with it is quite a chellange ^^
I personally would prefer more intermediates because they feel more natural like in bob mods.

Anyway, thanks for the hard work!! :)

Quick update -- the new release of Foundry has a "minimal mode" setting that will disable foundry buildings and move the recipes to assemblers (or, if Krastorio2 is enabled, to furnaces only). I tested it a tiny bit, but didn't have time for a longer playthrough. Please let me know if anything isn't working.

Thanks for your other ideas and feedback here, I'll consider all of it.

Hi, sorry for the necro, would you reconsider making foundry optional? I know we can disable it, but it's still annoying for someone like me who likes to keep a minimal mod list. You can put in the description that this mod is made for / recommended with foundry. Either way, thanks!

Thanks for the feedback. I definitely understand, these decisions are small tradeoffs but definitely impact peoples experience in different ways. I will reconsider over the coming weeks as I release one new mod and then plan out another.