Foundry

by brevven

Adds a foundry building for making alloys, etc. A standalone accessory from BZ Mods.

Content
10 months ago
1.1
30.1K
Manufacturing

i Upcoming Compatibility

6 days ago
(updated 6 days ago)

I wanted to reach out and ask what your plans are regarding updating this mod. I actually created a similar mod with a pair of not-a-furnace furnaces, naming them "Kilns" instead since I'd started from the angle of pyrolysis (https://mods.factorio.com/mod/wood-industry). I remember you'd added a setting in this mod to disable the foundry entity itself (and configuring the related coke+steel), but I figured I'd reach out and ask if you'd be interested in discussing your plans, given some of your mods (namely Aluminum and Tin+Glass) require early-game alloy smelting. I'd love to offer my assistance to simplify the amount of compatibility thingamajigs required between my mod and yours by striking the conversation early :)

To share some of my design process, I'd actually initially started adding my own "coke" item, but while researching found that it's basically pure carbon, which would overlap considerably with the new SA Carbon item (if I'm wrong please feel free to correct me, I got a C in chemistry and am personally willing to bend the rules of reality for the sake of gameplay so I decided to stop researching myself in circles). Regardless, I decided to make charcoal the catalyst for steel smelting, and then requiring Carbon as the catalyst for steel smelting in the SA Foundry. But that requires early-game automation of wood to produce charcoal, which is a significant enough divergence from gameplay for most Factorio players, so coke as its own item early-game makes sense for most, since Carbon is a late-game resource and when I experimented with making it craftable early-game as the steel catalyst, it made Carbon feel too cheap since it required eliminating the sulfuric acid ingredient.

I hope I'm not over-stepping boundaries by asking, but I'd be happy to pitch in to make something that's a middle-ground, splitting out charcoal into my mod and adding a Coke option otherwise. I'd also been thinking of increasing the size of my Kilns to 3x3 for the burner version and 4x4 like yours for the electric version, I simply wasn't ambitious enough with kitbashing vanilla assets (my personal asset creation method, since that's the easiest way to guarantee the assets still feel Vanilla, and simply increasing the scale looked funky and low-effort). But again, if you'd rather just update as-is and let players decide between which one to enable I'd be happy to take that path forward too :)

6 days ago

Hi. I am indeed still thinking through this mod. So here's a bit of a brain dump in response to yours.

Regarding coke, charcoal, and carbon. They are all indeed solid hydrocarbons with high carbon content. I think you are correct in that "carbon" can suffice. Since charcoal is made of wood in reality, carbon kinda sort represents charcoal. Since coke is made from coal, carbon also kinda sorta represents coke. The sulfuric acid part does seem to be Wube's own fictional spin, as sulfuric acid isn't actually used in the production of coke (though it can help with processing byproducts, but that's getting toward Pyanodon's level of detail....).

In reality, coke tends to be more energy dense than charcoal, so I think an early game charcoal item and late game carbon/coke item makes a lot of sense here.

Incidentally, coke doesn't need to be seen a strict upgrade over charcoal. For example, charcoal is more pure and so has uses in filtration that coke can't be used for. Could be interesting to add charcoal for some of the later game fluid recipes.

For space age, I need to decide if any Foundry building is unlockable pre-spaceflight. Or if e.g. Aluminum alloys that can be made in foundries only represent upgrades to improve recipes like LDS. Either way, given that Space Age has a foundry, maybe "kiln" is the way to go for the various solid hydrocarbon recipes (charcoal/carbon/coke/whatever). Maybe this current building would be called a "smeltery" and only be used for early alloys.... seems a tad complicated.

For 2.0 vanilla, I think I will leave things close to how they were for 1.1. I'm happy"swapping in" the kiln for the charcoal/coke recipes. I think allowing both charcoal and coke for steel would be fine if both exist. Maybe less coke is needed per steel (which would make some sense relative to reality), and so charcoal is mostly used for other things late game.

I understand your thoughts on assets as well. I like to match the factorio feel as much as possible in my mods. I'm not too concerned with the "kiln" footprint.

Overall I'm going to need to think on this a bit longer.

5 days ago

Hiya. Thanks for the detailed response!

I love the idea of using charcoal, and I actually sorted through some recipes after looking up what fluid processes charcoal can be used in and am trying out modifying and adding a few recipes to make charcoal a required ingredient.

And that sounds great, I'll keep an eye out for other mods as you update them. I'll likely prioritize SA compatibility quality-wise, but I'll do my best to keep making sure things work fine between our mods in base 2.0 as well of course.

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