First of all, I really appreciate this mod and I think this may be my favorite BZ mod so far. My god, saltwater electrolysis finally makes sense! No more pretending that "sand" is salt! I love it so much. I love mining salt and hoarding salt and electrolyzing salt and using salt. Salt salt salt. This is the best.

But even with the salt recipe for HCl and the HCl recipe for FeCl₃, it's taking massive amounts of time and resources to produce electronic components at a decent rate. The recipe for PCBs takes a while, consumes tons of resources, and nothing in its production line can use prod modules until you get to epoxy, several items down the line. Personally I'd multiply the yield of the PCB recipe yield by several times. At the point where I'm at in the game, I'm used to swimming in electronic components, not having them be my single scarcest resource.

Also just took a look at this. Here's my feedback. I know this mod is in an early stage, of course, so take everything with a grain of salt (ouch, sorry :P )

Overall I gotta agree with the OP here, it feels like a worse situation than the basic circuits with the massive # of chem plants they still require. I like more complex recipes - but I don't like turning my factory into 1/2 electronics production center. Also it adds a huge speed bump in the progression in a place that didn't need it, advanced circuits are already over-demanded I'd say, and making them much more difficult to produce doesn't help the pacing.

You've also added a significant additional copper burden to the factory without balancing it afaict. Advanced circuits now need 3 copper plates instead of 2 per circuit, and modules, another big sink for electric components, are using up a lot of copper as well. The Hydrogen chloride version of FeCL makes the extra iron used pretty small.

I'm confused by some of these recipes. It'd be good to understand why you've shoved different things in different places.

For instance:
- Why bakelite AND plastic in the PCB substrate? One kind of supersedes the other.
- Why plastic at all in the PCB substrated? Fr4 pcb's (most common) are epoxy-coated fibreglass, not plastic + bakelite + fireglass. And you've kind of reflected this by having silica involved.
- If there's now silica in the PCB substrate, to simulate the fibreglass, why is there still glass in the electrical components recipe?
- Why is epoxy (by which I assume you mean epoxy resin) just petro gas and chlorine (normally it would include bisphenol as well) and why is outputting salt? Where would you get sodium in petro gas? Or some other alkaline metal?
- What is salt doing in steel production? Are you using it as a stand in for HCL steel pickling?

I would consider doing the following:
- For electronic components, just leave them alone - they're not circuit boards, don't put PCB's in them
- Put standard fibreglass PCB's into the advanced circuit board recipe, vs putting them in electrical components.
- Make this PCB recipe just use silica + epoxy for the substrate, and then copper & ferric chloride for etching & interconnects.
- Make the result recipe that uses these create 3x advanced circuits to rebalance copper use for advanced circuits
- Don't make PCB construction add 10 extra buildings/advanced circuit assembler. That's way too much extra stuff. 2 extra buildings, 3 maybe per advanced circuit assembler would be more reasonable.
- Add Polycarbonate or other more complex recipes to processing units, which are currently very simple to make even compared to the existing chain for advanced circuits.

Other observations
- In SE/KR, the lithium-assisted electrical component recipe is untouched by your modifications and still uses the old recipe.
- The chlorine/iron plate recipe for FeCL seems to be a trap early game, though very very late game with tons of productivity it might even out.
- 8 salt /core mining output seems excessive - is salt really something you want to put on par w/iron ore and copper ore as a 'primary' ingredient? I realize this is just a style thing, but it feels odd to take low-consumption ingredients (the world produces/uses about 40x more iron ore than it does salt) and make them a 'primary' ingredient in the factory. Granted the same is true for copper, but its factorio, so that's kind of a legacy. Also since you can make salt 'for free' from water, its a doubly odd to force it to be a big core mining product and potentially clog up the factory/be forced to dispose of it.

I personally don't mind the copper consumption so much, because playing with the other BZ mods has made copper much less useful. I have frequently had huge surplusses of copper.

Everything else you suggested makes lots of sense. I suspected that the salt /is/ a stand-in for HCl, since none of the furnaces can take fluids (except of course as barrels, but let's not), and since HCl is supposed to be a later-game resource than steel. If this is going to be fixed or turned into an enrichment recipe of some kind, then I'd hope that it'd get easier to produce HCl; the salt recipe is certainly convenient, but I'd hope that its yield is improved.

I'm wary of suggesting too many changes at once. I'd love the exact changes you suggested, but I'm not familiar with how strong brevven's vision is for their mods, and I wanted to trust them to end up with something good without me backseat modding. But I also trust you on this being an appropriate set of suggestions to make, so: yes, these changes exactly. That'd be lovely and it'd make tons of sense.

I thought the lithium recipe for electronic components was deprecated and then removed altogether. That's weird. I don't mind the core processing yield much; core processing already produces a super inconveniently large volume and variety of products with BZ mods installed, and at this point I'd just like to see how much worse it can be made before it becomes impossible. I enjoy the fact that my reward for putting up with these inconveniences is infinite amounts of every raw resource at once.

Yeah of course it's a lot of thoughts and Brevven should feel free to ignore whatever he wishes to ignore. Tbh I'm probably not going to play with this one again until it gets more balanced, so I tossed out everything all at once, I'm sorry if it comes off as just too much.

Perhaps moving HCL to a steel enrichment recipe or post-processing in a chem plant would make more sense.

Thanks both for the feedback.

None of it comes off as too much. I really do rely on all this feedback -- what you like, what's missing, what you don't like/isn't working, etc. I try to take it all into account to at least some degree.

It seems like I've overtuned a few things here.

The main high-level tradeoff I try to balance is between complexity and resources. The number of machines needed for each step is another factor related to this tradeoff as well. I think I left a couple knobs too high on PCBs.

Some internals if you are interested. (I roughly treat 10 fluid as 1 solid.)

Vanilla factorio requires roughly 9 raw resources per advanced circuit. Full BZ including S&C now requires roughly 12. However, machines needed went up, and complexity went up with it, and thus the whole thing overshot quite a bit. I'll reexamine this, likely the total resources required will be decreased. It should end up with fewer than 9 raw resources needed. Not exactly sure where it will end up, but I will pay special attention to copper as I rebalance as well.

I've gotten similar feedback elsewhere to put PCBs straight into advanced circuits for K2. I am sort of leaning that way right now. Need to think on it a bit more first.

Some other random answers and questions here. I'll also dump some of this in the FAQ

At this "stage" of BZ mods, I currently treat vanilla plastic as a catch-all for "plastic-related-things". In this mod that includes Bisphenol A, and PVC. The ingredient called Epoxy here is actually closer to ECH (epichlorohydrin), hence the salt byproduct. There were a lot of ways to do it, I sort of settled on the simplest way that included an ingredient I felt comfortable calling "epoxy", while leaving salt part of the process. And thus PCB substrate = epoxy + plastic + silica. In a different way, this also represents that epoxies are cured, just slightly inaccurate as to the how -- I deliberately avoided adding hardeners lest this turn into Py Alien Life. Maybe a future mod can handle hardeners..... It's not an exact mirror of reality, but I tried to represent some truth while retaining a vanilla feel.

Incidentally, related to those suggestions, fiberglass proper is something I do want to explore. I considered it as a companion to this mod but inside S&S, but scope had already gotten pretty big, so silica it is for now. I will almost certainly reexamine fiberglass soon (probably not until after i finally get to noble metals....)

• The SE/K2 "lithium-assisted electrical component recipe" is currently not very modifiable as it's created in Space Exploration Postprocessing. A fix on the SE/K2 side is planned, but there's no timeline on it right now. If I make the above change regarding PCBs it might not matter as much.
• The FeCl₃ recipes are sort of meant to offer a tradeoff between # resources and # of machines. There's additional complexity due to HCL in there, as well. I think the balance is reasonable, but I'd love to hear more on how it plays out.
• I do agree too much salt in core mining, I somehow always forget to balance that in my first few released of a new mod.
• Salt in steel does indeed represent pickling. This may not have landed well given the way metals are processed in factorio. I'll think on this as well.
• Polycarbonates seems like a fun idea, but definitely out of scope for this mod. I do like that idea as a further reach into plastic without going full on petrochem.

Thanks for the reply, that explains a lot! I am interested, the questions weren't rhetorical whatsoever, and I tried to do some research to make them not seem really dumb.

Also I see where the sodium is coming from for ECH, it gets treated with Sodium hydroxide. Sounds like maybe that should be a salt in->% of salt out sort of recipe, based on that info? Up to you.

And again, my personal feedback isn't that the complexity is out of whack (after all, that's why we're installing BZ mods :) ) just the pure # of additional machines involved. Just tuning the production rate would address that, if you agree.

Should salt even be a core mining product at all?

With the updated balance, how're you feeling about the state of the mod?

Definitely getting close now. On paper, the raw resources are much more balanced right now, especially when prod moduled. I think copper is much more balanced. Though playtesting feedback will still be valuable to inform that.

(Related, I still plan on adding a cross-cutting setting to allow all recipes to be prod moduled)

The main big outstanding question is the K2 production line (i.e. should PCBs go directly into advanced circuits), I'm leaning towards changing it, just want to get it pretty close to "right" rather than changing my mind several times.

There are definitely minor tweaks to be made still.

In K2, I've made the change to have PCBs directly in advanced circuits, rather than in electronic components.

Oh excellent, been waiting on that change before starting a new SE game.

Cool, might be at a good point in a base revamp to add this to my game then. Did you do much to address the raw # of buildings involved?