Crude Alien Tech

A work-in-progress Factorio mod that adds early-game versions of the Gleba, Fulgora, Vulcanus, and Aquilo production buildings while boosting the existing versions into more powerful Mk2 variants.

I initially created this mod because I wanted to explore all the various modded planets out there, and I wanted to take a taste of the other planets with me without having to venture back to those planets first. This mod adds the ability to get what I consider the best technologies of Space age and take them anywhere in the solar system.

This mod adds several new buildings, each a primitive version of the buildings added by Space Age. Each of these buildings can be unlocked on Nauvis before launching your first rocket. This mod also adds several new items, recipes, and technologies to research in order to make full use of these buildings on other planets. Finally, the vanilla versions of these buildings are improved (as if they were made at uncommon level quality) to encourage you to still reach for the stars.

This mod adds these buildings, with the following changes from baseline:

• Crude Foundry (Reduced crafting speed, 20% productivity, -1 Module Slot)
• Crude Big Mining Drill (Reduced mining speed, 75% resource drain rate, -1 Module Slot)
• Crude Recycler (Heavily reduced recycling speed, -1 Module Slot)
• Crude Electromagnetic Plant (Reduced crafting speed, 20% productivity, -1 Module Slot)
• Crude Biochamber (Reduced crafting speed, 20% productivity, -1 Module Slot, reduced pollution absorption)
• Crude Agricultural Tower (Planting area is 5x5 instead of 7x7)
• Crude Cryogenic Plant (Reduced crafting speed, -2 Module Slots)

By comparison, the vanilla buildings have been boosted (though you can disable this in the mod settings):

• Foundry, Recycler, Electromagnetic Plant, Biochamber, Cryogenic Plant: Base rafting speed increased by 30%.
• Agricultural Tower: Planting area increased to 9x9 (up from 7x7) and planting speed increased by approximately 50%.
• Big Mining Drill: Resource Drain reduced to 41% (down from 50%).

New recipes have been added and technology has been altered to aid in using these items on Nauvis:

• Processing of wood into "Nooberries," enabling the use of Gleba's tech tree on Nauvis at reduced efficiency.
• The Heating Tower, heat exchanger, and steam turbines are available earlier.
• You can create molten metals without calcite, and can even use stone to supplement that process with artificial lava, but the yield is always worse than what you can do with calcite.
• You can extract Lithium, Fluorine, Tungsten, and Holmium from stone anywhere in the solar system, just not as well as you could on Fulgora or Aquilo.
• You can synthesize Ammonia using air and water with oxygen as a byproduct. This oxygen can supplement your production of solid and rocket fuel.

Recommended Mods:

• Flare Stack (100% compatible, provides an alternate method of venting excess gasses)
• Any Planet Start (100% compatible with vanilla planets. When starting on Fulgora, Vulcanus, Gleba, or Aquilo, the crude version of that planet's signature building is disabled but the recipes to enable the vanilla version's full use elsewhere in the solar system remains. When starting on another planet, you skip the crude version of that planet's signature building.)
• Wooden Fulgora: Coralmium Agriculture, Wooden Vulcanus: Sulfuric Bacteria, and Wooden Aquilo: Seabloom Algaculture (100% compatible. All three mods provide extra wood options for use on Fulgora, Vulcanus, and Aquilo, though none are required to get wood on any of those planets.)
• Other wood-related mods, such as Wooden Military or Wooden Industry (No native compatibility, but should be fine to install as-is.)

Other compatible Mods:

• Planetaris: Arig (100% compatible. Restructures Arig's tech tree to not require visiting Vulcanus first, but still encourage it.)
• Lignumis (100% compatible. Gold processing and, in a reverse of this mod's normal buildings, an electrified advanced version of the lumber mill)
• Planet Vesta (100% compatible. Uses Vesta's gasses where possible.)

Planned future compatibility patches:

• Omega Drill (The Omega-Tau drill can be produced earlier without needing to venture to Vulcanus.)

Future updates to this mod may include:

• A crude Fusion Plant with worse energy efficiency
• Early access to Stack Inserters, Turbo Belts, and all Mk3 Modules
• Early access to foundations
• Specific compatibility with other modded planets (as the need arises)