Good god does ore enrichment consume a ridiculous amount of lead, through its consumption of H₂SO₄. But nobody uses the lead chamber process IRL anymore, and even when they did, it didn't consume any lead; it didn't even use it as a catalyst. It was just what was used to make the reaction chamber, because lead isn't affected by any of the reactants. So I can't help but feel frustrated with the state of Factorio's technology when I see H₂SO₄ production eating all my lead. What's The Engineer doing, breaking the chamber every time they do the recipe? I want to go yell at The Engineer like, "Hey, asshole, haven't you heard of the contact process? Go get some rare metals instead."

I get that lead needs reasons to exist, and this is like half the reason for its existence (the other one being solder, and a minor one being pipes). It's just frustrating, is all.

Hi, thanks for the feedback. I understand what you mean. In this mod, lead plates replace iron plates as an ingredient in sulfuric acid, 1 for 1. So, if you prefer to stick to the vanilla setup using iron, you can add sulfuric-acid to the "Bypass recipes" setting for the Lead mod. Indeed, the "use" of iron in sulfuric acid is different than the use of lead, but it felt like a good way to replace some iron with lead.

It's possible that I'll revisit the "realism" aspect of some of these mods in the future and add (possibly optionally) a way to make some of the recipes feel a bit more realistic. Not really sure how this fits into plans currently. For now, my goal has generally been to respect the base vanilla feel of the game, sometimes moving a bit toward more realism.

Incidentally, regarding the contact process, I briefly considered it for the Noble Metals mod, but it felt a bit like overkill, especially since Pt isn't even the main catalyst used anymore. I will see if I can make it work nicely and consider adding it...

Honestly I'm not sure if bypassing the recipe is a good idea, since it drastically reduces the role of lead without a corresponding introduction of it elsewhere. It feels unbalanced. Plus personally I'm against introducing yet another heavy iron sink into my factory, when so many mods have already done the same thing to it, but that's just personal preference. I think I'll stick with lead for now. Thank you for considering it.

I should speak with Raiguard about replacing iron with rare metals in that recipe. Rare metals need more of a role anyway, and vanadium is like a textbook example of a rare metal.